The more emotional words you know, the higher your mental health.

Abstract

Previous studies have associated emotional granularity, the degree to which emotions can be recognized, with mental health comprehensively; however, they have found its measurement method to be burdensome. Therefore, this study considered emotional vocabulary, which is theoretically associated with mental health, to examine this relationship. A web-based survey was conducted among 397 Japanese subjects to examine the relationship between emotional vocabulary size and emotional granularity, and an exploratory analysis was also performed to examine the relationship between emotional vocabulary size and mental health. The results showed a significant positive correlation between emotional vocabulary size and emotional granularity. Furthermore, significant correlations were found between emotional vocabulary size and mental health. These results suggest that emotional vocabulary can influence mental health. The relationship between emotional vocabulary size and mental health and issues for future studies were also discussed.