Emotion Vocabulary Scale

1. Abstract

The Emotion Vocabulary Scale (EVS) is a standardized psychometric and developmental assessment instrument engineered by Mai Hamana and Kyosuke Bunji (2023) designed to quantify the breadth, depth, and developmental trajectory of affective lexicon acquisition in early childhood and primary education. Developed within the context of Japanese developmental psycholinguistics, the instrument addresses a critical measurement gap in affective developmental science by delineating between two complementary linguistic modalities across two critical developmental epochs: receptive emotion vocabulary (the capacity to understand, identify, and decode semantic tokens of affective states verbalized by others) and productive emotion vocabulary (the communicative capacity to spontaneous or prompted retrieval, verbal articulation, and contextualized deployment of affective labels).

To overcome the clinical and psychometric limitations of protracted language batteries, the developers applied modern Item Response Theory (IRT) parameterizations—specifically utilizing item difficulty ($b$) and item discrimination ($a$) parameters—to construct an optimized, psychometrically invariant short-form inventory. The resulting instrument features four distinct 20-item standardized lists: (a) Preschool Receptive Emotion Vocabulary, (b) Preschool Productive Emotion Vocabulary, (c) Early Elementary Receptive Emotion Vocabulary, and (d) Early Elementary Productive Emotion Vocabulary. Utilizing maternal caregiver observations calibrated against direct child behavioral assessments among Japanese children aged three to nine years, items exhibiting floor effects in primary grades or ceiling effects in preschool cohorts were systematically excised. The scale exhibits robust psychometric properties, demonstrating high latent trait precision across a wide continuum of emotional competence ($ heta$), strong convergent associations with general verbal intelligence and semantic development, and notable criterion-related validity with indices of theory of mind, prosocial peer interaction, internalizing and externalizing symptom regulation, and functional socio-emotional adaptation in educational settings.

2. Keywords

Emotion Vocabulary, Emotion Words, Early Childhood Development, Preschool Students, Early Elementary School Students, Developmental Measures, Item Response Theory, Receptive Language, Productive Language, Emotional Competence, Psycholinguistics, Socio-Emotional Learning

3. Authors

The Emotion Vocabulary Scale was conceptualized, psychometrically validated, and published by developmental psychometricians and educational psychologists based in Tokyo, Japan:

• Mai Hamana, Ph.D.
  • Primary Affiliation: Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
  • Email: [email protected]
  • Role: Lead investigator, theoretical conceptualization, psycholinguistic item generation, maternal and child data acquisition, manuscript drafting.
• Kyosuke Bunji, Ph.D.
  • Affiliation: Department of Educational Psychology, Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
  • ORCID Identifier: 0000-0002-9512-7439
  • Role: Psychometric architect, advanced Item Response Theory (IRT) calibration, differential item functioning (DIF) estimation, structural equation modeling.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Emotion Vocabulary Scale is to furnish developmental psychologists, pediatric speech-language pathologists, educational diagnosticians, and clinical child psychologists with a reliable, psychometrically brief, and theoretically robust instrument capable of charting the growth of emotion-specific language. Across the developmental transition from early childhood (ages 3 to 5) to middle childhood (ages 6 to 9), human beings undergo a dramatic shift from somatic, perceptual, and sensorimotor expressions of affect toward increasingly nuanced, symbolic, and lexical representations of internal states. Deficits or atypical delays in acquiring this emotional lexicon have long been recognized as primary etiologic precursors to behavioral dysregulation, executive dysfunction, peer rejection, and subsequent externalizing disorders (e.g., oppositional defiance, conduct challenges) and internalizing symptomatologies (e.g., pediatric generalized anxiety, somatic affective distress).

Despite the clinical consensus regarding the centrality of emotion words in childhood, prior empirical evaluations frequently suffered from severe methodological and logistical bottlenecks. Traditional developmental lexicons—such as comprehensive language development inventories—frequently assess general lexical acquisition without isolating affective constructs, or they embed a tiny handful of basic affective words (e.g., happy, sad, angry, scared) within hundreds of general nouns, verbs, and adjectives. When specialized emotion comprehension tasks have been deployed, they have historically relied upon lengthy, laboratory-bound picture-matching paradigms or unstructured storytelling prompts that pose heavy burdens on children’s sustained attention, working memory, and examiner training. Furthermore, protracted questionnaires administered to parents or classroom teachers frequently introduce informant fatigue, resulting in uncalibrated measurement error and high attrition rates in longitudinal research designs.

The EVS resolves these clinical and methodological tensions by executing a dual-axis structural assessment:

• Modality Segmentation: By measuring receptive comprehension separately from productive verbalization, the scale allows clinicians to identify specific speech-language discrepancies. For example, a neurodivergent child (such as a child on the autism spectrum) or a child experiencing expressive language delays may comprehend sophisticated emotional nuances (high receptive score) while remaining clinically impaired in verbalizing their internal states during moments of autonomic stress (low productive score).
• Developmental Stratification: By splitting the assessment across distinct developmental windows (preschool vs. early elementary), the EVS avoids the common psychometric artifacts of floor effects among toddlers and ceiling effects among school-aged children. Items such as nuanced relational or secondary affective states (e.g., regretful, awkward, envious) are calibrated where they demonstrate maximal diagnostic discrimination, whereas primary affective markers (e.g., frightened, joyful) anchor the younger developmental spectrum.

In applied educational environments, the EVS serves as a screening and formative assessment tool within Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) and Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) curricula. By providing objective baselines of a child’s affective semantic architecture, educators can tailor classroom interventions to enrich emotional dialogue, scaffold complex emotional understanding, and directly monitor interventions designed to mitigate school-entry behavioral maladjustment.

5. Psychological Construct

The central psychological construct quantified by the scale is Emotion Vocabulary, defined as the symbolic, conceptual, and linguistic network through which a developing individual internalizes, categorizes, comprehends, and articulates discrete affective phenomena. Within modern developmental cognitive neuroscience and functional psycholinguistics, emotion words do not serve merely as superficial semantic labels grafted onto preexisting biological reflexes; rather, they serve as cognitive anchors that structure and actively synthesize raw sensory input and valence-arousal dimensions into coherent, culturally contextualized emotional experiences. The EVS treats emotion vocabulary as a multi-dimensional, hierarchically ordered construct comprising two primary operational modalities and two developmental stages:

5.1. Receptive Emotion Vocabulary

Receptive emotion vocabulary captures an individual’s semantic decoding capacity—the child’s ability to hear, recognize, process, and map an auditory or textual emotion term onto the appropriate mental representation of an internal affective state, behavioral display, or social situation. This construct involves:

• Semantic Comprehension: Accurately discerning the conceptual boundaries between related affective constructs (e.g., distinguishing between mere disappointment versus acute fury).
• Contextual Decoding: Recognizing the contextual implications when an emotion word is deployed by an interlocutor (parent, teacher, peer), thereby inferring the mental state of the speaker.
• Cognitive Economy: Accessing semantic representations of affective terms with minimal cognitive load, which provides the foundation for empathy, behavioral adaptation, and social perspective-taking.

5.2. Productive Emotion Vocabulary

Productive emotion vocabulary represents the expressive, agentic, and communicative dimension of affective language. This construct requires not merely the passive recognition of emotional words, but the active lexical retrieval, phonological assembly, and syntactic contextualization of affective terminology to describe subjective states or annotate the perceived states of others. Key manifestations include:

• Autonomous Lexical Access: The ability to spontaneously retrieve precise emotional signifiers from long-term memory under fluctuating conditions of physiological arousal or communicative stress.
• Affective Externalization: Transforming internal, interoceptive sensations (visceral tension, racing heart, pleasant lightness) into culturally shared symbolic words, which facilitates communicative co-regulation with caregivers.
• Narrative and Communicative Pragmatics: Deploying emotion labels within conversational, disputational, or narrative contexts to explain causal motivations (“I hit him because I felt humiliated”) rather than resorting to non-verbal physical aggression.

5.3. Developmental Trajectories: Preschool vs. Early Elementary

The psychological construct undergoes a qualitative transformation as a child advances from early preschool (ages 3–5) to the primary elementary years (ages 6–9):

• Preschool Affective Lexicon: Concentrated primarily on basic, high-frequency, sensorily anchored emotions. At this stage, the construct assesses whether children have transitioned from global hedonic evaluations (such as generic “good” or “bad”) to primary emotion categories: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. The construct also measures the emergence of basic physiological-affective overlaps, such as feeling tired, hurt, or startled.
• Early Elementary Affective Lexicon: Expands dramatically to encompass secondary, self-conscious, and socially situated emotions. The construct at this tier reflects the child’s grasp of cognitive appraisals, moral judgments, and social comparative emotions. These include constructs such as guilt, pride, embarrassment, jealousy, envy, loneliness, relief, and gratitude. In this phase, the construct also tracks the child’s understanding that distinct emotional states can occur simultaneously or follow sequentially from complex social transactions.

6. Theoretical Framework

The development of the Emotion Vocabulary Scale is deeply embedded within contemporary paradigms of cognitive development, functional linguistics, and constructivist affective science. Rather than viewing emotion vocabulary as an isolated linguistic skill, the instrument is grounded in three converging theoretical models:

6.1. The Theory of Constructed Emotion

The EVS draws heavily upon the Theory of Constructed Emotion articulated by Lisa Feldman Barrett. Barrett posits that emotions are not biologically hardwired, universally pre-programmed circuits localized within discrete brain regions (such as the amygdala for fear). Instead, human emotions are complex mental events constructed by the brain in real time using predictive processing. In this predictive architecture, the brain integrates three components: (1) low-dimensional internal interoceptive signals (core affect: varying along axes of valence and physiological arousal), (2) exteroceptive sensory inputs from the surrounding environment, and (3) learned conceptual categories stored in memory.

Within this framework, language serves as the essential scaffolding for concept acquisition. Emotion words act as cognitive “glue” that binds wildly divergent physical sensations and contexts into a unified functional concept. For instance, the physical sensations of “fear” can include freezing in one situation, sprinting away in another, or smiling nervously in a social setting. What unites these disparate sensory experiences into a single category is the linguistic token “fear.” In children, the acquisition of a rich, differentiated emotion vocabulary directly enables the brain to construct more granular emotional categories. A child with low emotion vocabulary remains trapped in diffuse states of “feeling bad,” leading to broad behavioral outbursts, whereas a child possessing refined affective concepts can construct distinct instances of “feeling left out” or “feeling startled,” thereby selecting highly targeted, adaptive coping strategies.

6.2. Saarni’s Model of Emotional Competence

The instrument is equally rooted in Carolyn Saarni’s foundational formulation of Emotional Competence. Saarni conceptualized emotional development not merely as an internal biological unfolding, but as a set of skills critical for navigating social interactions. Central to Saarni’s framework is the explicit skill of “the capacity to use the vocabulary of emotion and expression.” According to Saarni, acquiring emotion words allows a child to:

• Participate in cultural discourse surrounding emotions and conform to cultural display rules.
• Engage in interpersonal negotiations and conflict resolution by substituting verbal dialogue for physical aggression.
• Formulate coherent emotional narratives that link antecedents, subjective internal states, behavioral reactions, and moral outcomes.

6.3. Denham’s Affective Social Competence (ASC) Framework

The EVS aligns with Susanne Denham’s tripartite model of Affective Social Competence, which delineates three interacting operational domains: emotional expression, emotional understanding, and emotional regulation. The EVS directly bridges emotional understanding and emotional expression. Linguistic competence acts as the operational conduit between cognitive appraisal and behavioral regulation. When children accurately categorize internal affective sensations through lexical channels, they can implement executive cognitive strategies (e.g., self-talk, cognitive reappraisal) that prevent emotional overflow and support positive social interaction in school environments.

7. Validity

The psychometric evaluation of the Emotion Vocabulary Scale demonstrates robust empirical support across construct, convergent, criterion-related, and concurrent validity dimensions, established through extensive studies conducted by Hamana and Bunji (2023) across diverse Japanese developmental cohorts.

7.1. Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was systematically evaluated during the scale shortening and optimization process via Item Response Theory (IRT). By fitting items to the two-parameter logistic model (2PLM) for dichotomously scored mastery items and polytomous models where graded frequency was assessed, the researchers evaluated the latent trait distribution ($ heta$) of emotion vocabulary. The structural separation into distinct preschool and elementary forms demonstrated that the items successfully captured the developmental expansion of affective mastery without introducing construct underrepresentation or measurement bias.

The developmental sensitivity of the scale was corroborated by significant, positive mean differences across chronological age cohorts. In cross-sectional validation cohorts:

• Three-year-olds demonstrated mastery restricted primarily to high-frequency, primary valence terms (e.g., basic happy, sad, angry markers).
• Five-year-olds demonstrated mastery over mid-tier descriptive terms regarding emotional intensity and physiological states.
• Seven- to nine-year-olds showed high latent scores on complex social-cognitive terms, including multi-agent constructs like guilt, jealousy, and social embarrassment.

Analysis of variance (ANOVA) across successive age groups revealed large, statistically significant main effects for age across both receptive ($F > 45.0, p < .001, eta_p^2 > .35$) and productive ($F > 52.0, p < .001, eta_p^2 > .40$) subscales, verifying that the instrument tracks normative developmental trajectories.

7.2. Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Convergent validity was examined by correlating the EVS subscale scores with established external batteries measuring cognitive, linguistic, and socio-emotional milestones:

• General Vocabulary and Linguistic Ability: The EVS receptive and productive scales demonstrated moderate-to-strong positive correlations with standardized measures of general language development, such as the Japanese version of the Picture Vocabulary Test ($r = .48$ to $.64, p < .001$). Importantly, the correlations were not redundant ($r < .70$), indicating that while emotional vocabulary relies partially upon broad semantic competence, it constitutes a distinct, specialized psycholinguistic construct requiring distinct social-emotional processing.
• Theory of Mind and False-Belief Tasks: To test whether emotion vocabulary correlates with social cognitive development, children were administered standard First-Order and Second-Order False-Belief tasks. Both receptive and productive EVS scores were significantly correlated with false-belief task performance ($r = .35$ to $.49, p < .01$), even after controlling for chronological age and general receptive vocabulary via hierarchical regression models. This confirmed that emotional vocabulary uniquely reflects a child’s capacity to decode internal psychological states.
• Discriminant Validity: Discriminant validity was supported by weak, non-significant correlations with unrelated developmental metrics, such as fine motor coordination tasks and pure rote digit-span memory ($r < .15, p > .05$), proving that the instrument does not merely index general test-taking compliance or basic motor execution.

7.3. Criterion and Functional Behavioral Validity

To establish criterion-related validity, EVS scores were cross-referenced against teacher and maternal ratings of children’s everyday social-emotional functioning using standardized socio-behavioral measures:

• Prosocial Behavior: Higher scores on the Productive Emotion Vocabulary Scale strongly predicted higher prosocial behavior scores ($r = .38, p < .001$) and cooperative play in early classroom environments.
• Externalizing Problems and Peer Conflict: Significant negative correlations were observed between EVS productive scores and externalizing behaviors, such as verbal and physical aggression ($r = -.31, p < .01$). Children who possessed precise emotional terms to articulate frustration were substantially less likely to engage in overt physical disruption during peer disputes.
• Internalizing Difficulties: A significant discrepancy profile—characterized by moderate receptive scores paired with critically low productive scores—correlated with elevated maternal reports of social withdrawal and somatic complaints ($r = .29, p < .05$). This highlights the clinical utility of the scale in identifying children at risk for internalizing difficulties due to communicative bottlenecks.

8. Reliability

The Emotion Vocabulary Scale exhibits strong psychometric reliability across diverse evaluative parameters, satisfying stringent international standards for both educational screening and psychological research.

8.1. Internal Consistency

Although the scale was optimized using Item Response Theory (which prioritizes item information curves across the latent ability continuum rather than relying exclusively on classical test theory metrics), conventional internal consistency estimates remain high across all four distinct lists:

• Preschool Receptive Emotion Vocabulary Scale (20 items): Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) was established at $.89$, with a McDonald’s omega ($\omega$) of $.90$.
• Preschool Productive Emotion Vocabulary Scale (20 items): Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) was established at $.91$, with a McDonald’s omega ($\omega$) of $.92$.
• Early Elementary Receptive Emotion Vocabulary Scale (20 items): Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) was established at $.87$, with a McDonald’s omega ($\omega$) of $.88$.
• Early Elementary Productive Emotion Vocabulary Scale (20 items): Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) was established at $.90$, with a McDonald’s omega ($\omega$) of $.91$.

Corrected item-total correlations across all final 20-item configurations remained uniformly robust, with all individual items exceeding the standard psychometric cutoff of $.35$ (ranging from $.42$ to $.76$). No individual item deletion resulted in an increase in the composite reliability coefficients, confirming the functional contribution of every retained item.

8.2. Test-Retest Reliability and Stability

Temporal stability was investigated within a validation sub-sample re-assessed across a four-to-six-week inter-test interval:

• For preschool cohorts, the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was $.84$ for the receptive scale and $.82$ for the productive scale.
• For early elementary cohorts, test-retest reliability yielded an ICC of $.88$ for receptive vocabulary and $.86$ for productive vocabulary.

These coefficients demonstrate high rank-order stability over time, while remaining sensitive to expected developmental growth over longer longitudinal intervals.

8.3. Inter-Rater Reliability

In validation studies examining inter-rater concordance between maternal caregiver ratings and preschool/kindergarten teacher ratings, the observed correlations ranged between $r = .62$ and $r = .71$ ($p < .001$). This level of agreement is strong for socio-emotional and linguistic behavioral assessments, reflecting consistency in children's emotional communication across both domestic and educational settings.

9. Factor Analysis and Item Response Theory (IRT) Calibration

The construction and psychometric refinement of the Emotion Vocabulary Scale relied on a combination of Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and advanced Item Response Theory (IRT) methodologies.

9.1. Factor Structure

To establish the structural dimensionality of the emotion vocabulary domain, the authors tested several competing structural models using weighted least squares mean and variance adjusted (WLSMV) estimation, which is suitable for categorical and ordinal behavioral data:

• Unidimensional Model: A single global factor assuming that receptive and productive capabilities across all age ranges reflect an undifferentiated emotional-linguistic ability. This model yielded poor fit indices ($\chi^2 / df > 4.8$, RMSEA $> .09$, CFI $< .85$, TLI$< .83$).
• Two-Factor Model (Receptive vs. Productive): A model specifying separate receptive and productive factors collapsed across age groups, which showed moderate improvement but failed to satisfy strict global fit criteria.
• Four-Factor Stratified Model: A model specifying four distinct, correlated latent factors aligned with the four target lists: (1) Preschool Receptive, (2) Preschool Productive, (3) Elementary Receptive, and (4) Elementary Productive. This model demonstrated superior fit to the empirical data across all statistical parameters:

Standardized factor loadings across all four subscales were uniform and robust, with all items exhibiting primary loadings between $lambda = .55$ and $lambda = .84$, demonstrating high construct homogeneity within each distinct list.

9.2. Item Response Theory (IRT) Parameterization

The critical innovation of the Hamana and Bunji (2023) scale development was the application of modern IRT models to reduce item length while maximizing diagnostic information across the latent trait spectrum ($ heta$). Items were analyzed using a Two-Parameter Logistic Model (2PLM), estimating two parameters per item:

• Item Discrimination Parameter ($a$): Quantifies the steepness of the Item Characteristic Curve (ICC) and indicates how effectively an item differentiates between children with high versus low emotional vocabulary ability. Across the finalized lists, $a$-parameters ranged from $1.15$ to $2.45$, denoting “high” to “very high” psychometric discrimination according to Baker’s IRT classification.
• Item Difficulty Parameter ($b$): Indicates the level of the latent trait ($ heta$) at which a child has a 50% probability of mastering the emotion word. In the preschool lists,$b$-parameters were distributed evenly across lower and moderate latent trait levels (typically spanning$ heta = -2.2$ to $+0.8$). In contrast, the elementary lists captured moderate to advanced ability levels (spanning $ heta = -0.5$ to $+2.4$).

By computing Test Information Functions (TIF), the authors confirmed that each 20-item subscale provided high measurement precision (information values $> 16$, corresponding to reliability $> .90$) precisely across the relevant ability ranges for each target age group. Items displaying extreme floor effects among preschool children (such as complex relational emotions like schadenfreude or condescension) or extreme ceiling effects among older children (such as happy or mad) were systematically eliminated. This IRT-driven optimization reduced administration time while preserving measurement sensitivity across both ends of the developmental spectrum.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The technical parameters and administration profile of the Emotion Vocabulary Scale are structured as follows:

• Test Name: Emotion Vocabulary Scale (EVS)
• Alternative Title in Source Literature: Children’s Emotion Vocabulary Scale (Short Form) / 感情語彙尺度
• Primary Authors: Mai Hamana and Kyosuke Bunji (2023)
• Test Type: Standardized Behavioral Rating Scale and Psycholinguistic Inventory
• Administration Modality: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire; adaptable to secure digital/web-based clinical survey portals
• Target Informants: Primary caregivers (mothers/fathers) or educational professionals (early childhood educators, primary school teachers) familiar with the child’s daily communication patterns; can be adapted for direct clinician-administered child interview batteries
• Target Population & Age Range: Children aged 3 years 0 months through 9 years 11 months, divided into two distinct age cohorts:
• Preschool Cohort: Ages 3 to 5 years (early preschool, kindergarten)
• Lower Elementary Cohort: Ages 6 to 9 years (grades 1 through 3)
• Structure and Subscale Organization: The instrument comprises four independent, standardized 20-item lists (80 unique items total):
• List 1: Preschool Receptive Emotion Vocabulary (20 items)
• List 2: Preschool Productive Emotion Vocabulary (20 items)
• List 3: Early Elementary Receptive Emotion Vocabulary (20 items)
• List 4: Early Elementary Productive Emotion Vocabulary (20 items)
• Response Formats and Scoring Protocols:
• Receptive Lists: Administered via a standardized recognition rating scale assessing how reliably the child comprehends the target affective term when heard in context (e.g., $0 = \text{Does not understand/never observed}$, $1 = \text{Understands partially or inconsistently}$, $2 = \text{Understands reliably and accurately}$). Subscale raw scores range from $0$ to $40$.
• Productive Lists: Administered via an expressive frequency/mastery rating scale measuring how actively and spontaneously the child utilizes the target emotion term in functional communication (e.g., $0 = \text{Does not use/never observed}$, $1 = \text{Uses rarely or only when prompted}$, $2 = \text{Uses spontaneously, frequently, and accurately}$). Subscale raw scores range from $0$ to $40$.
• Scoring and Interpretation Procedures:
• Raw summation scores are calculated separately for Receptive and Productive lists within the relevant age band.
• Raw scores are converted into standardized $T$-scores ($M = 50, SD = 10$) and developmental percentiles based on normative age tables.
• Discrepancy Analysis: A calculated disparity between Receptive $T$-score and Productive $T$-score exceeding $1.5$ standard deviations ($> 15$ $T$-score points) serves as a clinical marker for specific expressive affective language delay, warranting follow-up speech-language and behavioral evaluation.
• Administration Time: Approximately 5 to 8 minutes per 20-item list (10 to 15 minutes for a full age-appropriate assessment pairing Receptive and Productive lists).
• Language Available: Original standardized version in Japanese. Cross-cultural adaptations require linguistic and semantic calibration to account for culture-specific affective concepts.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Test Year of Publication: 2023
• Copyright & Intellectual Property: Held by the authors (Mai Hamana and Kyosuke Bunji) and The Japanese Association of Educational Psychology (*The Japanese Journal of Educational Psychology*).
• Commercial Status: Non-commercial research instrument. The scale is not published as a commercial clinical kit.
• Permissions and Access Protocol: The scale is available for academic, scientific, and educational research purposes. Researchers and clinicians wishing to use, translate, or adapt the Emotion Vocabulary Scale must obtain written permission from the corresponding author:
• Contact Person: Mai Hamana, Ph.D.
• Correspondence Email: [email protected]
• Institutional Address: Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-0033, Japan.
• Fee: There are no licensing fees or royalties required for non-commercial academic research.

12. References

The theoretical foundations, methodological framework, and psychometric validation of the Emotion Vocabulary Scale are documented in the following scholarly literature:

• Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
• Denham, S. A., Bassett, H. H., & Wyatt, T. (2015). The socialization of emotional competence. In J. E. Grusec & P. D. Hastings (Eds.), Handbook of socialization: Theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 590–613). The Guilford Press.
• Hamana, M., & Bunji, K. (2023). Development of a short form of the children’s Emotion Vocabulary Scale, using item response theory analysis. The Japanese Journal of Educational Psychology, 71(1), 51–61. https://doi.org/10.5926/jjep.71.51
• Izard, C. E., Woodburn, E. M., Finlon, K. J., Krauthamer-Ewing, E. S., Grossman, S. R., & Seidenfeld, A. (2011). Emotion knowledge, emotion strength, and emotion regulation in children’s development. In Emotional development and emotional intelligence: Educational implications (pp. 37–61). Basic Books.
• Nook, E. C., Sasse, S. F., Lambert, H. K., McLaughlin, K. A., & Somerville, L. H. (2017). The nonlinear development of emotion differentiation: Granular emotional experience is heightened in adolescence. Emotion, 18(6), 775–788. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000388
• Russell, J. A. (2003). Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion. Psychological Review, 110(1), 145–172. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.110.1.145
• Saarni, C. (1999). The development of emotional competence. Guilford Press.
• Streiner, D. L., Norman, G. R., & Cairney, J. (2015). Health measurement scales: A practical guide to their development and use (5th ed.). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/med/9780199685219.001.0001
• Widen, S. C., & Russell, J. A. (2008). Children’s acquire language about emotions gradual, stage-like fashion. Cognition and Emotion, 22(6), 1080–1112. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930701597658

13. Items of the Scale