Department of Psychology2024-11-0920141367-222310.1111/ajsp.120712-s2.0-84911805337http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12071https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14288/13317The present study examines the linguistic representations of emotion terms in relation to educational attainment and self-construal through a two-part narration task. Eighty Turkish adults recounted four events that they experienced in the last five years of their lives (event-description task) and then described what they felt during these events (emotion-elicited narration task). The results show that higher levels of educational attainment and autonomous-related self-construal predicted higher levels of linguistic abstractness in emotion terms, whereas higher levels of related self-construal predicted lower levels of linguistic abstractness in emotion terms. Comparisons of the level of abstractness of emotion terms in event-descriptions and emotion-elicited narrations indicate that while the linguistic abstractness of emotion terms was similar across the two tasks in the lower-educated group, it increased in the emotion-elicited narration task in the higher-educated group. The role of formal education and self-construal in emotional language use were discussed as sources of within-culture variation.PsychologySocial psychologyJournal Article1467-839X344244100004Q35087