Emotions and Goal Progress: A Linguistic Analysis of Goal Narratives and its Relation To Goal Progress

Abstract

Individuals express a wide range of emotions in their writing beyond positive and negative emotions. In the current study, we set out to examine how positive, negative, and epistemic (curiosity and anxiety) emotions are related to individual goal progress. Instead of relying solely on self-reported emotions, we employed an indirect qualitative analysis using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to examine student goal narratives (N = 201) and self-reported goal progress. Our results suggest that students use various emotions when describing their goals, especially positive emotions and epistemic curiosity. Despite the frequent use, we found no statistical association between emotions and progress toward achieving goals. In order to gain a realistic insight into how multiple emotions are utilized in goal narratives and goal progress, we suggest that future research use a more sophisticated method, such as a longitudinal study or combination of self-report, human coders and LIWC.