Use Of Emotion Words Research Articles

Linguistic style as a digital marker for depression severity: An ambulatory assessment pilot study in patients with depressive disorder undergoing sleep deprivation therapy.

Digital phenotyping and monitoring tools are the most promising approaches to automatically detect upcoming depressive episodes. Especially, linguistic style has been seen as a potential behavioral marker of depression, as cross-sectional studies showed, for example, less frequent use of positive emotion words, intensified use of negative emotion words, and more self-references in patients with depression compared to healthy controls. However, longitudinal studies are sparse and therefore it remains unclear whether within-person fluctuations in depression severity are associated with individuals' linguistic style. To capture affective states and concomitant speech samples longitudinally, we used an ambulatory assessment approach sampling multiple times a day via smartphones in patients diagnosed with depressive disorder undergoing sleep deprivation therapy. This intervention promises a rapid change of affective symptoms within a short period of time, assuring sufficient variability in depressive symptoms. We extracted word categories from the transcribed speech samples using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Our analyses revealed that more pleasant affective momentary states (lower reported depression severity, lower negative affective state, higher positive affective state, (positive) valence, energetic arousal and calmness) are mirrored in the use of less negative emotion words and more positive emotion words. We conclude that a patient's linguistic style, especially the use of positive and negative emotion words, is associated with self-reported affective states and thus is a promising feature for speech-based automated monitoring and prediction of upcoming episodes, ultimately leading to better patient care.

Do pictures' emotional valence and arousal affect younger and older adults' narratives?

Emotional content, specifically negative valence, can differentially influence speech production in younger and older adults' autobiographical narratives, which have been interpreted as reflecting age differences in emotion regulation. However, age differences in emotional reactivity are another possible explanation, as younger and older adults frequently differ in their affective responses to negative and positive pictures. The present experiment investigated whether a picture's valence (pleasantness) and arousal (intensity) influenced older adults' production of narratives about those pictures. Thirty younger and 30 older participants produced narratives about pictures that varied in valence (positive, negative, and neutral) and arousal (high, low). Narratives were recorded via Zoom, transcribed, and analyzed with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count-22 to get measures of emotional word use, disfluencies, and linguistic distance. Results showed that negative valence increased age differences in speech production independent of picture arousal: Relative to younger adults, older adults used more positive words, fewer negative words, and had more silent pauses when telling narratives about negative pictures. In contrast, high arousal decreased age differences such that older adults used fewer positive words in narratives about positive pictures and more linguistically distant words evidenced by fewer present-tense verbs, relative to narratives about low-arousal pictures. Contrary to an explanation of enhanced regulation or control over emotions in older adulthood, these findings support the idea that older adults' speech production is influenced by their reactivity or affective response to emotional stimuli even when the task is not to communicate one's emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Feelings in words: Emotion word use and cardiovascular reactivity in marital interactions.

Putting feelings into words is often thought to be beneficial. Few studies, however, have examined associations between natural emotion word use and cardiovascular reactivity. This laboratory-based study examined emotion word use (i.e., from computerized text analysis) and cardiovascular reactivity (i.e., interbeat interval changes from baseline) across two interaction contexts (i.e., conflict and positive conversations) in 49 mixed-sex married couples (age: M = 43.11, SD = 9.20) from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. We focused on both frequency (i.e., relative proportion of emotion words) and diversity (i.e., relative proportion of unique emotion words) of emotion words. Data were collected between 2015 and 2017 and analyzed treating both partners and conversations as repeated measures, resulting in 196 observations overall (four per dyad). Findings showed that (a) when spouses used more negative emotion words (especially anger), they showed higher cardiovascular reactivity. This finding was robust when controlling for covariates; generalized across gender, interaction contexts, and socioeconomic status. Moreover, (b) when spouses used a more diverse negative emotion vocabulary, they showed higher cardiovascular reactivity, but this was not robust when controlling for negative emotion word frequency. Associations between (c) positive emotion word use and cardiovascular reactivity were not statistically significant. Verbalizing negative emotions thus seems to go along with higher cardiovascular reactivity, at least in the short term. Replication is needed across other relationship types, genders, and sexual orientations. These findings highlight emotion word use as an indicator of cardiovascular reactivity, which has implications for the identification of potential health risks that emerge during marital interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Does Pollyanna hypothesis hold true in death narratives? A sentiment analysis approach

Pollyanna hypothesis claims that human beings have a universal tendency to use positive words more frequently and broadly than negative words. The present study aims to test Pollyanna hypothesis in medical death narratives at both lexical and text levels by using sentiment analysis and emotion detection methods, and to qualitatively analyze the contextual use of emotion words to deepen the understanding of doctors' emotions. Sentiment analysis showed a strong token-based linguistic positivity and a weak type-based negativity bias at the lexical level, and a general positivity bias at the text level, despite the gender of the doctors. Emotion detection discovered three prominent emotions of “joy”, “sadness”, and “anger”, and a greater diversity of negative emotions in contrast to positive emotions in medical death narratives. Contextual analysis revealed that emotion words associated with joy were primarily observed in contexts related to doctors' actions and behaviors aiming to benefit others and promote social wellbeing. Emotion words associated with sadness and anger were chiefly employed to describe situations involving patients' death and doctors' attitudes towards death. The results confirm Pollyanna hypothesis at both token-based lexical level and text level and falsify the hypothesis at type-based lexical level. Possible explanations are explored by contextual analysis, and theoretical analysis from the perspectives of cognitive linguistics and social psychology. The findings are expected to enrich the understanding of Pollyanna hypothesis as well as the junior doctors' emotional responses to clinical deaths.

Emotion language use in narratives of the 9/11 attacks predicts long-term memory.

Despite considerable cognitive neuroscience research demonstrating that emotions can influence the encoding and consolidation of memory, research has failed to demonstrate a relationship between self-reported ratings of emotions collected soon after a traumatic event and memory for the event over time. This secondary analysis of data from a multisite longitudinal study of memories of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, asked the question of whether emotional language use could predict memory over time. In the 2 weeks following the 9/11 attacks, participants (N = 691; Mage = 36.8; 72% identifying as male; 76% identifying as white) wrote narratives about how they learned of the attacks and the impact of the attacks on them. Language features of these narratives were extracted using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count program and used to predict three types of memory: (a) event memory accuracy, (b) flashbulb memory consistency, and (c) emotion memory consistency. These outcomes were assessed at the time of writing, 1, 3, and 10 years after the 9/11 attacks. Results of linear mixed-effects models indicate that greater use of negative emotion words in narratives predicts better event memory accuracy 3 and 10 years after the attacks and worse flashbulb memory consistency 10 years after the attacks. However, emotion word use does not predict emotion memory consistency across time. We also examine whether other exploratory linguistic predictors are associated with memory over time. These findings suggest that written language may serve as a potential early indicator of memory over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Emotional Content of Children's Writing: A Data-Driven Approach.

Emotion is closely associated with language, but we know very little about how children express emotion in their own writing. We used a large-scale, cross-sectional, and data-driven approach to investigate emotional expression via writing in children of different ages, and whether it varies for boys and girls. We first used a lexicon-based bag-of-words approach to identify emotional content in a large corpus of stories (N>100,000) written by 7- to 13-year-old children. Generalized Additive Models were then used to model changes in sentiment across age and gender. Two other machine learning approaches (BERT and TextBlob) validated and extended these analyses, converging on the finding that positive sentiments in children's writing decrease with age. These findings echo reports from previous studies showing a decrease in mood and an increased use of negative emotion words with age. We also found that stories by girls contained more positive sentiments than stories by boys. Our study shows the utility of large-scale data-driven approaches to reveal the content and nature of children's writing. Future experimental work should build on these observations to understand the likely complex relationships between written language and emotion, and how these change over development.

Trauma Isn’t One Size Fits All: How Online Support Communities Point to Different Diagnostic Criteria for C-PTSD and PTSD

ABSTRACT Reddit has provided rich data on mental health discourse. The present study uses 40,335 online posts from Reddit communities to investigate how language can contribute to the understanding of PTSD and C-PTSD. The results showed distinct language patterns in the use of first-person pronouns, cognitive processing, and emotion words, suggesting that they are separate disorders with different effects on survivors. Further, while some social media studies have differentiated submissions and comments, few have investigated the language changes between these contexts. Post-hoc results showed a clear distinction between two contexts across several linguistic markers. Discussion and future directions are explored.

Linguistic Variables and Gender Differences Within a Messenger-Based Psychosocial Chat Counseling Service for Children and Adolescents: Cross-Sectional Study.

Text messaging is widely used by young people for communicating and seeking mental health support through chat-based helplines. However, written communication lacks nonverbal cues, and language usage is an important source of information about a person's mental health state and is known to be a marker for psychopathology. The aim of the study was to investigate language usage, and its gender differences and associations with the presence of psychiatric symptoms within a chat counseling service for adolescents and young adults. For this study, the anonymized chat content of a German messenger-based psychosocial chat counseling service for children and adolescents ("krisenchat") between May 2020 and July 2021 was analyzed. In total, 661,131 messages from 6962 users were evaluated using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, considering the following linguistic variables: first-person singular and plural pronouns, negations, positive and negative emotion words, insight words, and causation words. Descriptive analyses were performed, and gender differences of those variables were evaluated. Finally, a binary logistic regression analysis examined the predictive value of linguistic variables on the presence of psychiatric symptoms. Across all analyzed chats, first-person singular pronouns were used most frequently (965,542/8,328,309, 11.6%), followed by positive emotion words (408,087/8,328,309, 4.9%), insight words (341,460/8,328,309, 4.1%), negations (316,475/8,328,309, 3.8%), negative emotion words (266,505/8,328,309, 3.2%), causation words (241,520/8,328,309, 2.9%), and first-person plural pronouns (499,698/8,328,309, 0.6%). Female users and users identifying as diverse used significantly more first-person singular pronouns and insight words than male users (both P<.001). Negations were significantly more used by female users than male users or users identifying as diverse (P=.007). Similar findings were noted for negative emotion words (P=.01). The regression model of predicting psychiatric symptoms by linguistic variables was significant and indicated that increased use of first-person singular pronouns (odds ratio [OR] 1.05), negations (OR 1.11), and negative emotion words (OR 1.15) was positively associated with the presence of psychiatric symptoms, whereas increased use of first-person plural pronouns (OR 0.39) and causation words (OR 0.90) was negatively associated with the presence of psychiatric symptoms. Suicidality, self-harm, and depression showed the most significant correlations with linguistic variables. This study highlights the importance of examining linguistic features in chat counseling contexts. By integrating psycholinguistic findings into counseling practice, counselors may better understand users' psychological processes and provide more targeted support. For instance, certain linguistic features, such as high use of first-person singular pronouns, negations, or negative emotion words, may indicate the presence of psychiatric symptoms, particularly among female users and users identifying as diverse. Further research is needed to provide an in-depth look into language processes within chat counseling services.

Exploring linguistic markers, threat appraisals, and genetic variation during mixed‐sex couples' conflict conversations

AbstractHow couples communicate during conflict interactions can have important implications for their relational well‐being. The theory of resilience and relational load provides a valuable lens for exploring the associations among couples' language use during conflict conversations and the extent to which such conversations are perceived as threatening to one's relationship, as well as whether genetic markers moderate such associations. Forty‐seven mixed‐sex couples had a conversation about a topic causing conflict in their relationship and provided saliva samples that were tested for their genotype (GG, AA, or AG) for oxytocin receptor gene rs53576. The results revealed that neither the use of communal language nor positive emotion words were associated with perceiving the conversation as less threatening to their relationship. Genetic variation did not moderate the associations with either positive emotion word use or communal language. However, a three‐way interaction between sex, OXTR, and positive emotion word use emerged in the post hoc analyses, indicating that positive emotion word use was negatively associated with threat appraisals for women with a GG genotype, and positively associated with threat appraisals for men with a GG genotype. Implications for mixed‐sex couples' communication and research on language use during conflict conversations are discussed.

Supplemental Material for Feelings in Words: Emotion Word Use and Cardiovascular Reactivity in Marital Interactions

Supplemental Material for Feelings in Words: Emotion Word Use and Cardiovascular Reactivity in Marital Interactions

How do you feel reflecting on your teaching practice?

Reflecting on teaching situations is important for student teachers’ professionalization and can be understood as a learning opportunity. However, despite being important for their professional development, only little is known about the interindividual psychological processes that occur when student teachers reflect on their teaching. The present study examines 146 student teachers’ teaching-related self-efficacy beliefs at two timepoints (at the beginning and end of one semester) and their emotion word use in 239 written reflections on differently perceived teaching situations (135 mastery and 104 challenging) using Wald tests and path modelling. First, our results show that student teachers use more positive than negative emotion words in their written reflections. Second, examining relations between situation and emotions, we show that emotion word use differs significantly between teaching situations. Further, higher negative emotion word use in reflections on mastery experiences (positive teaching situations) is associated with lower self-efficacy at the end of one semester. Thus, it is important to focus particularly on the challenges that student teachers experience during teaching when aiming to promote their self-efficacy beliefs.

Social power may be associated with health through positive emotion

Increased social power—defined as one’s influence on another’s behavior—guides activation of one’s behavioral activation system which, in turn, elicits greater positive emotion. Positive emotion has also been linked to greater health. The current research assessed whether power and positive emotion are related to health. In Study 1, participants (N = 403; M age = 48.33 years) wrote a narrative about a time in which they felt powerful or powerless. Greater self-reported feelings of power, concurrent with more frequent use of positive emotional words within the narrative, was associated with fewer references to health within the narrative. In Study 2, participants (N = 401; M age = 33.05 years) primed with the concept of power (vs. powerlessness) reported greater health competency through enhanced positive emotion. Findings provided preliminary data supporting the continued study of power to better understand the link between positive emotion and health. Future research should elucidate the long-term relationships between these variables to examine whether increased power can produce downstream positive effects on health and health behavior.

Linguistic Analysis of Online Domestic Violence Testimonies in the Context of COVID-19.

Worldwide, an increase in cases and severity of domestic violence (DV) has been reported as a result of social distancing measures implemented to decrease the spreading of the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19). As one's language can provide insight in one's mental health, this pre-registered study analyzed word use in a DV online support group, aiming to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on DV victims in an ex post facto research design. Words reflecting social support and leisure activities were investigated as protective factors against linguistic indicators of depression in 5,856 posts from the r/domesticviolence subreddit and two neutral comparison subreddits (r/changemyview & r/femalefashionadvice). In the DV support group, the average number of daily posts increased significantly by 22% from pre- to mid-pandemic. Confirmatory analysis was conducted following a registered pre-analysis plan. DV victims used significantly more linguistic indicators of depression than individuals in the comparison groups. This did not change with the onset of COVID-19. The use of negative emotion words was negatively related to the use of social support words (Spearman's rho correlation coefficient [rho] = -0.110) and words referring to leisure activities (rho = -0.137). Pre-occupation with COVID-19 was associated with the use of negative emotion words (rho = 0.148). We conclude that language of DV victims is characterized by indicators of depression and this characteristic is stable over time. Concerns with COVID-19 could contribute to negative emotions, whereas social support and leisure activities could function to some degree as protective factors. A potential weakness of this study is its cross-sectional design and the lack of experimental control. Future studies could make use of natural language processing and other advanced methods of linguistic analysis to learn about the mental health of DV victims.

The effects of affective touch from a robot on the use of emotional words and changes in mood state when disclosing worries

The effects of affective touch from a robot on the use of emotional words and changes in mood state when disclosing worries

Emotion word use patterns and eating disorder symptoms: Considering the circumplex model of affect and basic emotions theory.

No prior research has examined whether the types of emotion words individuals use to describe their affective experiences cluster along affective dimensions inherent within leading affect theories, or how such emotion word use maps onto eating disorder (ED) symptoms. To address these gaps, latent profile analysis was used to empirically-identify groups of young adults (N=352) by how often they use emotion words characterized by the circumplex model of affect's valence-arousal dimensions and basic emotions theory's basic versus complex emotion word categorizations. Auxiliary analyses examined differences in groups' ED symptoms (binge eating, purging, restricting, excessive exercising, muscle building, body dissatisfaction, and cognitive restraint). The 5-profile valence-arousal model and 4-profile basic-complex model were the best-fitting theoretically-supported solutions. Valence-arousal profiles with greater negative affect valence generally exhibited worse ED pathology than others, whereas profiles with greater positive affect valence produced inconsistent risk- and protective-factor relations with distinct ED symptoms. Basic-complex profiles characterized by frequent use of both basic and complex emotion words generally had the greatest ED severity, and profiles with greater basic emotion word use exhibited elevated binge eating. Individual-differences in young adults' emotion word use patterns, versus sample-level averages only, warrant further consideration in ED prevention and research. The present findings suggest that young adults differ in the types of words they use to describe their emotional experiences, and that these unique emotion word use patterns are linked to distinct eating disorder symptoms. These sources of variation warrant further consideration in eating disorders prevention efforts and future research seeking to advance affect-based eating disorders theories.

EMOTION WORD USE AND CARDIOVASCULAR REACTIVITY DURING MARITAL INTERACTIONS

Abstract Cardiovascular reactivity in midlife may predict health problems in later life, but few studies have examined cardiovascular reactivity during marital interactions, as an important interpersonal context, and potentially modifiable linguistic correlates. This laboratory-based study examined emotion word use (i.e., positive and negative emotion words derived using automated language analysis) and cardiovascular reactivity (i.e., heart rate changes from baseline) across two marital interaction contexts (i.e., positive and conflict conversation) in 46 married couples (92 individuals; age: M = 42.6, SD = 8.5). Results showed that (1) spouses who used more negative emotion words during conflict showed higher cardiovascular reactivity. Moreover, (2) when husbands used a more diverse negative emotion word vocabulary during positive conversations, their wives showed higher cardiovascular reactivity and (3) when wives used a more diverse positive emotion vocabulary, their husbands showed lower cardiovascular reactivity. Findings highlight the relevance of couples’ emotion word use for cardiovascular reactivity in midlife.

INSIGHTS INTO HEALTH-RELEVANT INTERPERSONAL DYNAMICS IN AGING COUPLES FROM THE LAB AND DAILY LIFE

Abstract Emerging research demonstrates that long-term and daily health indicators are closely linked in aging partners. Yet, not much is known about exactly how partners get under each other’s skin. This symposium investigates different positive and negative interpersonal contexts, including physical intimacy, positive and negative emotional experiences, and couple conversations (e.g., conflict, recounting distressing memories, discussing enjoyable topics), and their link with neuroendocrine and cardiovascular markers. The four talks feature a variety of study designs ranging from laboratory research to ambulatory assessment methods which recruited couples in midlife and old age. Kolodziejczak et al. use ambulatory assessment data to examine links between (experienced and wished for) physical intimacy, affect, and cortisol in older couples. Pauly et al. pool data from three ambulatory assessment aging studies to analyze how own and partner positive and negative affective states are intertwined with everyday cortisol secretion in old age. Wilson et al. invited middle-aged to older couples to engage in two different conversations (recounting a difficult memory, conflict) and investigated concurrent changes in affect and cardiovascular activity. Meier and colleagues make use of automated language analysis to examine how positive and negative emotion word use during a positive and negative conversation in the laboratory relates to cardiovascular reactivity in middle-aged couples. The discussion by Christina Röcke will delineate insights gained from these four papers, discuss their strengths and limitations, and outline directions for future inquiry.

Parent Emotion Talk with Preschoolers from Low-Income Mexican American and Chinese American Families: Links to Sociocultural Factors.

Emotion talk (ET), an emotion socialization practice theorized to promote children's emotion understanding and emotion regulation, has been linked to better socioemotional adjustment in diverse samples. Immigrant children face developmentally unique challenges and opportunities related to their multi-lingual and multi-cultural experiences. The present study aimed to identify sociocultural correlates of parent ET in two groups of low-income immigrant families with preschool-age children: Mexican American (MA) and Chinese American (CA) families. In 90 parent-child dyads (child age = 38 to 70 months, 59% girls; 46 Mexican American and 44 Chinese American) recruited from Head Start programs, parents' (mostly mothers') ET quality and quantity (i.e., use of emotion words, emotion questions and explanations, and overall elaborateness of ET) were coded from verbal transcripts of a shared picture book reading task. First, we found similarities and differences in ET across the two groups. Both MA and CA parents used emotion words, emotion questions, and emotion reasoning, whereas linking the story to personal emotion experience was infrequent. MA parents used more negative emotion words, emotion reasoning, and engaged in more elaborate ET than CA parents. Second, we examined the unique relations of multiple socio-cultural factors (SES, cultural orientations, parent and child demographics) to parent ET. Parent education and child age were associated positively with emotion questions, income was associated positively with emotion reasoning, and parents' heritage culture orientation was associated positively with the elaborateness of ET. The findings highlight the need to consider socio-cultural variations in emotion socialization practices when adapting and disseminating socioemotional learning interventions.

“Thank you for the terrific party!” – An analysis of Hungarian negative emotive words

Abstract The term negative emotive word refers to those words that, on their own, i.e. without context, have a semantic content that may be associated with negative emotion, but sometimes they lose it partly or wholly. In the literature negative emotive words are mainly discussed within the group of intensifiers, e.g. awfully good. In the present paper, we call this phenomenon polarity loss. At the same time, there is another use of negative emotive words that is rarely discussed in the literature, namely the case where the examined word, despite its negative semantic content, expresses a positive evaluation of the speaker, e.g. brutális alaplap (lit. ‘brutal motherboard’ – ‘high quality motherboard’). We call this phenomenon polarity shift. The aim here is to thoroughly examine the two different phenomena on the basis of the data of a Hungarian speech corpus HuTongue. After an in-depth analysis of the qualitative and quantitative features of negative emotive words, we propose corresponding ways of their meaning representations, using a lexical pragmatic approach and the concept of enantiosemy.

Mining Emotions from the Finnish War Letter Collection, 1939– 1944

Our paper analyses emotional language used by Finnish soldiers and civilians in their private communication during World War II. The dataset consists of 7,000 handwritten letters converted into a machine-readable corpus with rich metadata. The dataset offers a unique opportunity to make a statistical analysis of people’s emotional responses to the war. We engage in key questions of the cultural history of war, such as the connection between soldiers’ emotional language and violence: did soldiers’ emotional language become more laconic in the course of the war? While computational approaches to mining emotions have been common in fields like computer science and linguistics, they have not gained wider popularity in historical research. Pioneering attempts have been based on individual emotion words carefully chosen by an historian, or on readily available, more generic emotion lexicons. Compared to machine-learning solutions, lexicon-based approaches require less computational effort and are more transparent to interpret. Our methodology combines the ready-made word list FEIL with contextual knowledge of historians. FEIL gives around 7,000 Finnish words an emotion category and intensity ratings. First, the emotion lexicon was filtered based on high intensity. Then the domain expert manually removed words not particularly emotionally intensive in the context of war letters. The expert also annotated the list of the most frequent words in the war letter collection and handpicked emotionally intensive words not included in FEIL. Our final list covered 298 emotion words. We quantified changes in their use over time. In contrast to earlier research, our analysis indicates that soldiers’ and civilians’ emotionality did not significantly differ during World War II. Soldiers’ use of emotion words saw a decline in the last stages of the war, but overall their letters were almost as emotional as the civilians’ letters. We did indeed identify some changes in the individual emotion words used by the soldiers in their letters: patriotic words in particular decreased in the course of the war. In addition to empirical findings, our paper sheds light on the problem of universal emotion lexicons in historical research: linguistic, cultural and temporal differences between present-day lexicons and historical datasets can lead to biased interpretations. Thus, our paper contributes not only to the history of emotions but also to emotion mining, which is historically sensitive.