Deviations from normative emotion representation predicts social and affective dysfunction

Emotion concepts serve as key guideposts for understanding our feelings, communicating them to others, and selecting appropriate actions. Yet people differ in how they represent these concepts—‘anger’ may mean rage for one person and mild irritation for another—even though we typically assume a shared understanding. Because emotion concepts support efficient communication and coordination, such divergences raise a critical question: what happens when an individual’s emotion-concept representations deviate from the group norm? Here we investigate an overlooked aspect of emotion, the degree to which conceptual representations of emotion integrate and align with the normative emotional scaffolding that emerges at the population level. We find across three studies (N=1,490) that greater misalignment from the group-level representation of emotion concepts has broad costs for adaptive social and emotional functioning. Individuals whose concepts are more misaligned are less sensitive to others’ antisocial behaviors during economic games, leading to less strategic punishment of norm violators and poorer social coordination. Consistent with the idea that emotion unfolds between people and the larger social community, greater misalignment also tracks pervasive affective dysfunction, including more severe alexithymia, anhedonia, and depression. That emotion misalignment may be a key through-line or pathway disrupting affective functioning seen in mood disorders, offers new theoretical insight into the possible mechanisms underlying emotion processing. Together, these findings underscore that emotion knowledge is fundamentally social and that systematic deviations from shared emotion concepts undermine both social adaptation and emotional health.