Article Emotional Response Categorization in Adolescents and Young Adults Caroline Herry and Ce´ lia Maintenant EA 2114, Psychologie des Ages de la Vie et Adaptation, Universite´ de Tours, Tours, France Isabelle Blanchette Groupe de Recherche en Cognition, Neurosciences, Affect et Comportement, De´partement de Psychologie, Universite´ du Que´bec a` Trois-Rivie`res, Trois-Rivie`res, Canada Elodie Tricard, Guillaume Gimenes, and Vale´rie Pennequin EA 2114, Psychologie des Ages de la Vie et Adaptation, Universite´ de Tours, Tours, France Abstract Categorization is based on cognitive mechanisms allowing the development of inter- nal representations of the environment that guide behavior. This study tests the influence of emotions on categorization in adolescents and young adults. After a mood induction (negative, positive, or neutral), we compared how 68 adolescents aged 13 to 15 and 57 young adults aged 21 to 29 categorized emotional concepts using a lexical emotional categorization task. Participants had to choose which of three associates, of different emotional valence (positive, negative or neutral), was more similar to a target concept. The aim of this study was to determine if adolescents rely on the emotional dimension in categorization more than adults. The results show that the emotional state can influence the cognitive process of categorization in adolescence, particularly in the negative mood. Keywords Emotional response categorization, emotional induction, positive and negative emotion Psychological Reports 0(0) 1–23 ! The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0033294118784864 journals.sagepub.com/home/prx Corresponding Author: Ce´lia Maintenant, Universite´ de Tours, 3 rue des Tanneurs, 37041, Tours, Cedex 1, France. Email: celia.maintenant@univ-tours.fr