Emotional Words Research Articles

Abstract Cognitive load refers to the mental resources available in working memory, which can vary due to, e.g., the inherent complexity of a task. Studies have investigated the effect of a higher cognitive demand on speech, either on fluency, lexical use or linguistic display of emotions. Fewer have investigated all these parameters jointly, and most focus on English. Here we manipulate working memory load with an image-depiction task with or without access to the image and investigate whether cognitive load impacts speech production in French, i.e., correlates with both fluency metrics (number of word tokens and lemmas, lemma-token ratio, counts and rates of filled pauses, interruptions and repetitions) and/or with lexical metrics (use of words from a given lexical field or with a given connotation). Our results show that, compared to their peers in the low cognitive load condition (with access to the image), speakers under high cognitive load (who describe the image from memory) indeed tend to use more disfluencies but show little differences in the use of specific vocabulary or in emotional words. Although the absence of lexical differences may be due to inherent language- or task-specific differences, the confirmation that an increase in cognitive load implies an increase in disfluency indicates that at least this one parameter is a cross-linguistic indicator of speech production under high cognitive load.

Autosuggestion and mental imagery bias the perception of social emotions.

ABSTRACT In the evolving digital era, user-generated content (UGC) plays a crucial role in shaping journalistic narratives, shedding light on the corporeal realities of news coverage. This study delves into the embodied nature of UGC—its visual, auditory, and emotional components—that significantly enhance the perceptual immediacy and authenticity of news. Utilizing descriptive and correlational analyses, this research examines how these embodied characteristics impact journalistic authenticity and emotional resonance. The findings illuminate that aspects such as on-site Filming and emotional Language are closely linked with journalistic objectivity and emotional intensity. Moreover, the incorporation of UGC foregrounds ethical challenges, highlighting concerns over privacy and misinformation, which are pivotal in maintaining journalistic integrity. This analysis underscores the necessity for news organizations to adeptly navigate these complexities, promoting an understanding of how the corporeal engagement facilitated by UGC redefines journalistic practices and values. By emphasizing the material and discursive positioning of bodies in journalism, this paper contributes to broader discussions on the corporeal dimensions of communication in the digital age, offering guidelines for establishing ethical standards that respect both the integrity of news and its inherently participatory nature.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can take on personas that provide culturally informed advisor-client conversations that facilitate mental health therapy. This paper is a comparative study of bilingual, persona-based therapeutic conversations created by LLMs in the person of either a client or a counselor. We will compare an English-speaking big brother (Raoul) and a Chinese auntie persona ("Aunt Mei" or Mei Yi) in conversations concerning depression. We will use quantitative linguistic analysis, tracking sentiment trajectory, an exploratory self-disclosure scoring system, and a lexicon of culturally based metaphors to examine how these personas impact the conversation dynamic. The results show the two groups diverge in the language they use. The Chinese Auntie Mei persona uses multitudes of proverbs and social-relational types of communication, while the Western Raoul persona makes more use of first person plural ("we") inclusivity. These differences in language types impact the level of self-disclosure registered. Psychiatric clients talking in English exhibit much higher levels of use of both "I" pronouns and negative emotional words from the beginning. The Chinese clients, in contrast, reveal their feelings in a more indirect, gradual manner. The sentiment trajectory shows the sentiment of Chinese (ZH) clients rises steeply and quickly, while the sentiment trajectory of English (EN) clients proceeds more gradually. The main result of our study is that culturally grounded personas impact the therapeutic process in ways beyond mere linguistic flavor. They impact and frame the self-disclosure and emotional improvement trajectories themselves. We will discuss the implications for design of culturally informed bilingual therapeutic AI which respects local narrative forms while facilitating self-disclosure.

Differentiation of physically and psychologically familiar voices and their roles in spoken word processing: Evidence from ERPs and neural oscillation.

This study explores the use of English emotion vocabulary by learners of English with L11 Moroccan Arabic (MA). Just as with color terms, languages carve up the emotional spectrum differently. Cross-linguistic comparison of emotion lexicons may, therefore, reveal varying degrees of lexical equivalence. In addition to this lexical anisomorphism, the study investigates the effects of word frequency and L2 proficiency on the use of English emotion vocabulary. To examine these factors, intermediate and advanced learners of English, as well as a group of native English speakers, watched two concise films and described the actors’ emotions during specific scenes. The data was analyzed listing the most frequently used emotion terms for each group. Chi-square tests were then performed to compare the significance of the lexical choices made by native speakers to those provided by each learner group. The results indicate that advanced learners managed to describe the suggested scenes using nearly the same emotion words as native speakers. However, some culture-specific emotion terms posed problems for them. L2 proficiency demonstrated a strong effect, as intermediate learners often deviated from native usage. The implications drawn from these results suggest that culturally specific emotion terms, which lead to lexical inequivalence, should be considered alongside factors, namely word type and word frequency, that can challenge learners in acquiring L2 vocabulary. The study also highlights the importance of context-rich instruction of L2 emotion vocabulary and opens avenues for further research that would contribute to the understanding of the intersection between second language acquisition, culture, and emotions.

The current study investigates performance differences between sensorimotor and emotional experiences when conceptualizing abstract concepts, focusing on two distinct embodied views between the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Emotional Grounding Theory. Methodologically, this study employs the Visual Corpus Analysis approach to conduct an image-based empirical exploration of a dataset comprising 35,100 images. These images correspond to 11 Chinese basic color terms, 100 Chinese emotion words, 100 random Chinese words without any control of valence, arousal and concreteness ratings, 100 random Chinese words with normally distributed valence, arousal, and concreteness ratings, 20 abstract notions that are metaphorically associated with colors and are affectively distinguishable in the Chinese context, and 20 Chinese concrete words referring to food concepts. The study includes two key analyses: (i) a comparison of the re-representation quality of the target abstract and concrete concepts within four types of semantic vector spaces constructed based on the color terms, emotion words, non-controlled random words, and well-controlled random words; and (ii) an examination of potential factor(s) responsible for the functional (dis)similarities between color terms and emotion words in depicting semantic relations of the target abstract notions. Results reveal that the color-based vector space yields higher re-representation quality for the target notions compared to the emotion-based vector space, and the functional (dis)similarities between specific colors and emotions are significantly influenced by the brightness-valence congruency effect. These findings offer novel insights into the ongoing debate on the embodied groundings of abstract concepts within the field of embodied cognition.

Music plays an increasingly vital role in modern society, becoming a fundamental part of everyday life. Beyond entertainment, it contributes to emotional well-being by helping individuals express their feelings, process emotions, and find comfort during different life moments. This study explores the emotional impact of Ed Sheeran’s lyrics and Sia’s lyrics on listeners. Using an exploratory approach, it applies a text mining tool to extract data, identify key dimensions, and compare thematic elements across both artists’ work. The analysis reveals distinct emotional patterns and thematic contrasts, offering insight into how their lyrics resonate with audiences on a deeper level. These findings enhance our understanding of the emotional power of contemporary music and highlight how lyrical content can shape listeners’ emotional experiences. Moreover, the study demonstrates the value of text mining as a method for examining popular music, providing a new lens through which to explore the connection between music and emotion.

Abstract With good reason, there is widespread consensus that words are at the heart of emotion history research: historians of emotion spend an enormous amount of time on lexical analysis, reconstructing and delineating the affective vocabularies of the past. While readily acknowledging the essentialness of our scholarly commitment to words, this commentary offers a friendly reminder that, in some cases, an overly rigid lexical approach risks distorting how emotion is actually understood in the sources we explore. It uses Nicolas Coeffeteau’s A Table of Humane Passions (1621) as a case study to illustrate how some of our common scholarly assumptions about emotion words can in fact be confounded by a historical source – the lexical approach, in other words, can occasionally be limiting, and I argue that we should keep this slight caution in mind when analyzing the emotional language of the past.

Over 5 billion people now use social media platforms. As our social lives become increasingly entangled with online social networks, it is important to understand the dynamics of online information diffusion. This is particularly true for the political domain, as political elites, disinformation profiteers, and social activists all use social media to gain influence by spreading information. Recent work found that emotional expressions related to morality (moral-emotion expression) are associated with increased diffusion of political messages—a phenomenon we called “moral contagion.” Here, we perform a large, pre-registered direct replication (N = 849,266) of Brady et al. using the dictionary methods from the original paper, as well as new large-language models. We also conduct a meta-analysis of all available data testing moral contagion (5 labs, 27 studies, N = 4,821,006). The estimate of moral contagion in the available population is positive and significant (IRR = 1.13, 95% CI = [1.06, 1.20]), such that for each additional moral–emotional word in a post, the expected number of shares was 13% greater. The mean effect size of the pre-registered replication (IRR = 1.17) better estimated the population effect than the original study (IRR = 1.20). Contrary to prior work, we find that the moral contagion model substantially outperforms nonsense models of diffusion (“XYZ contagion model”). Moral contagion was also conceptually replicated when moral–emotional content was measured using state-of-the-art natural language processing methods. These findings reveal that the moral contagion effect is highly robust across datasets and methods.

BackgroundBacterial vaginosis (BV) is the most common cause of vaginal discharge in people of childbearing age in the United States. More information about what patients do and do not like about the most common BV products and the extent to which they reduce BV symptoms is important for understanding patients’ health and the current treatment landscape for BV.ObjectiveUsing data from online drug review forums, this study’s objectives were to (1) quantitatively characterize the patient voice via sentiments (positive to negative) and emotions about the three most common Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved treatments for BV—oral metronidazole (OM), vaginal metronidazole (VM), vaginal clindamycin (VC)—and (2) qualitatively summarize themes characterizing the patient-perceived impact of BV and BV products.MethodsData for this mixed methods descriptive study came from 1645 users’ reviews of BV products posted on WebMD.com and Drugs.com. Reviewer attributes, reviewer-submitted star ratings, and sentiment analysis (SA) using word-emotion association were analyzed with descriptive statistics and bivariate associations. A traditional qualitative analysis using qualitative description was also performed.ResultsMost reviewers were female (n=629, 99.4%), between the ages of 18 and 44 years, and reported using BV products for less than 1 month, though qualitative results suggested most reported recurrent BV infections. Quantitative results revealed reviewers’ preference for vaginal products. The mean star ratings for VC were significantly higher when compared to OM and VM. VC reviews had the highest proportion of positive emotion words compared to OM and VM. Qualitative results for VC supported the quantitative findings: favorable themes related to perceptions of value, effectiveness in alleviating symptoms, and minimal side effects. Additionally, despite some concerns related to the cost of VC, reviewers said they would use the medication again. Other qualitative findings supported BV medical education campaigns for patients and providers on BV treatment.ConclusionsOverall, people want a BV treatment that is easy to use, quickly alleviates symptoms, and has minimal side effects. Patients use product reviews to inform their decision-making about BV treatment, ask and seek answers to health-related questions, and share their experiences, presenting a unique opportunity for comprehensive patient education through clinical encounters or public health outreach efforts.

Controversial events are social incidents that trigger wide discussion and strong emotions, often touching on public interests, moral judgment, or social values. Their diffusion typically involves moral evaluations and affect-laden language. Prior work has mostly examined how the quantity of moral and emotional words shapes diffusion, while largely overlooking blame attribution—that is, whether audiences locate the cause of a controversial event in individual actions or in social structures, across different contexts. Using 189,872 original Weibo posts covering 105 events in three domains— street-level bureaucracy (SLB; individual attribution), education governance (EG; structural attribution), and gender-based violence (GBV; mixed attribution)—we estimate negative binomial models with an interaction between word type and account verification and report incidence rate ratios (IRR). Moral contagion is strongest for SLB (IRR = 1.337) and attenuated for EG (IRR = 1.037). For GBV, moral-emotional language decreases reposts (IRR = 0.844). Unverified accounts amplify the diffusion advantage of moral-emotional wording for both individually and structurally attributed issues, with the largest gains in SLB. When disaggregating by valence and discrete emotions, fear-type moral-emotional words are positively associated with reposts in GBV (IRR = 1.314). Theoretically, we shift the question from whether moral contagion occurs to when it operates, highlighting attribution tendencies and verification status as key moderators. Empirically, we provide cross-issue evidence from large-scale Chinese social media. Methodologically, we offer a replicable workflow that combines length-normalized lexical measures with negative binomial models, including interaction terms.

ABSTRACT While most previous studies of evaluative conditioning have examined changes in emotional word meaning, few studies have examined the conditioning of gustatory word meaning. This study investigated whether the sweet taste meanings associated with real food names are linked with nonsense words. Participants completed the first evaluation phase, a conditioning phase, and the second evaluation phase in an experiment pairing Japanese nonsense words with Japanese sweet and non-sweet food names collected in a preceding survey. In both evaluation phases, they rated the sweet taste meaning, familiarity, valence, and arousal associated with nonsense words. The results revealed that nonsense words combined with sweet food names induced a sweeter taste meaning than did those combined with non-sweet food names after the conditioning phase. Despite controlling for familiarity, valence, and arousal across conditions, nonsense words paired with non-sweet food names were rated as more exciting than those paired with sweet food names. Familiarity and valence ratings were higher after the conditioning than before in both conditions. These results suggest that evaluative conditioning using sweet food names can promote sweet meanings and preferences of new food product names.

This study examines the performative, spatial, and affective dimensions of Marian devotion in two early modern women’s prayerbooks from Vorarlberg: the Valduna Prayerbook (Freiburg i. Br., UB Hs. 1500,30) and the Thalbach Prayerbook (Bregenz, VLB Hs. 17). Both manuscripts demonstrate that prayer was not a purely mental act but a choreographed devotional performance shaped by posture, gesture, and gaze. Rubrics repeatedly direct the devotee to pray before an image of the Virgin, transforming the image into a locus of embodied interaction that engaged sight, movement, and emotion. Analysis of sixteen such image-based prayers reveals how spatial instructions, somatic cues, and affective language converge to produce a physically enacted piety. Quantitative assessment of affective vocabulary shows that gaze-based prayers concentrate emotional language—especially of joy, sorrow, and distress—at twice the density of other texts in the same manuscripts, underscoring their heightened emotional charge. These prayerbooks thus construct a devotional choreography in which the devotee’s body becomes both instrument and interpreter of spiritual meaning. By situating image, word, and motion within the convent environment, the study reveals how female religious communities enacted Marian devotion as lived performance, where space, gesture, and affect generated spiritual presence.

The article is devoted to the analysis of emotional language as a key tool of political discourse that determines the nature of speech influence and the formation of public opinion. Emotional language is considered not just as an expressive means, but as an important mechanism for constructing meanings. In today's mediatized politics, emotions are becoming a powerful resource for influencing the electorate: they help politicians build trust, increase engagement, and evoke an emotional response from the audience. The research is based on the provisions of modern political linguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, which consider language as a tool of persuasion and manipulation. Using the example of Donald Trump's 2016 speech, it is shown that emotionally colored words and expressions perform the function of not only enhancing expression, but also structuring a political message, setting a framework of interpretation for listeners and forming a stable emotional image of a politician. The evaluation analysis model developed by J. Martin and P. White is used as the main method. Within the framework of this approach, all emotionally colored units of speech are identified, classified into three categories – affect (emotions), judgment (assessment of human behavior) and appreciation (assessment of phenomena and objects), and their quantitative and qualitative analysis is carried out. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time the model of evaluative analysis by J. Martin and P. White was applied to the study of emotional language in political discourse based on the material of Donald Trump's 2016 speech. This approach made it possible to identify patterns of the use of emotionally colored vocabulary and to determine its role in the formation of moral and ideological assessments. The analysis showed that emotional language performs not only an expressive, but also a strategic function – it is used to construct a political identity, mobilize support, create a positive image of a politician and discredit opponents. Special attention is paid to the category of judgment, especially its subcategory social sanction, reflecting moral judgments and social expectations. The results obtained clarify the ideas about the pragmatic potential of evaluative vocabulary and demonstrate its importance for shaping political influence in modern conditions. The findings of the study can be used in a comparative analysis of emotional language in different cultural and historical contexts.

Does self-reference modulate the processing of all emotional words? The distinction between emotion-label and emotion-laden words

Effectiveness and determinants of narrative-based corrections for health misinformation: A systematic review.

Translating Emotion Words in a Japanese Healing Fiction – Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

This study examines sports media discourse during times of crisis, using the coverage of the match crisis between USM El Harrach and Mostakbal Rouissat by El Heddaf TV as a case study. It applies both linguistic and communication analysis to assess how the event was portrayed. Findings revealed the use of emotional language and a clear bias, which contributed to escalating rather than calming the crisis. The study also highlighted a lack of balance, objectivity, and diversity of perspectives in the media coverage. The study recommends adopting a more professional and neutral approach in crisis reporting and emphasizes the need to train sports journalists in crisis communication to strengthen the media’s role as a constructive actor in the sports field.

Because young children’s emotion knowledge and language skills grow in tandem and contribute to their success in school, the Feeling Thinking Talking (FTT) teacher training, which addresses both areas, was developed. In this training, preschool and kindergarten teachers were taught to use language support strategies (LSSs) and responsive child-directed speech when talking about emotions with the children in their care. Whether these educational practices in teacher–child talk improve children’s emotion knowledge was examined with N = 275 children (Mage = 49.86 months, SD = 7.21, range = 35–66 months at t1) who were cared for by teachers in N = 16 training classrooms and N = 13 waitlist-control classrooms, which were nested in 13 centers. Children were individually tested on morphology, grammar, and emotion knowledge (EK) before (t1) and after the FTT training (t2). At t1 and t2, teacher–child interactions were videotaped and coded. Single-level models suggest that training group teachers used LSSs (input-oriented strategies and stimulation techniques) more often and involved children in longer dialogues than control group teachers at t2. Multilevel models show that dialogue length and feedback strategies at t1 and input-oriented strategies at t2 contributed to the explanation of gains in children’s EK over time (after controlling for covariates). Moreover, teachers’ use of input-oriented strategies at t2 that improved under the FTT training partially mediated the effect of the intervention on children’s EK growth. In addition, children’s (growing) language skills seem to mediate the effects of these educational practices on their EK. Ways in which educational practices affect emotion learning are discussed.