This study compared the structure and quality of emotion language in
adolescents with externalizing disorders (N = 21), internalizing
disorders (N = 18), and without a behavioral or emotional
disorder (N = 16). Emotion language was elicited in response to
vignette material prototypical for anger/sadness and fear, to
autobiographical experiences, and to an actual emotional challenge. The
findings reveal different emphases in the emotion language of
internalizing and externalizing youth rather than a relative weakness for
externalizing adolescents. Overall, clinical adolescents used fewer
emotion terms that were semantically specific for anger, sad, or fear than
typical adolescents. The results also show that emotion language is
affected differentially for externalizing and internalizing adolescents
depending on the emotion domain. Internalizing youth's emotion
language to anger/sad events used inner-directed terms, situational
references, and reduced intensity while their representation of emotions
in response to salient threatening material was dominated by terms with a
cognitive focus. Externalizing adolescents' emotion language
responses to anger/sad events were more outer directed and intense,
and their emotion language in a salient threat situation more orientated
to direct affective terms. The results suggest that examining emotion
language for specific emotion domains in adolescents with specific
disorders will better clarify the role of emotion language in the
regulation of emotions than approaches that globalize emotion language
competencies or deficits.