Emotion vocabulary reflects state of well-being

Date:
September 10, 2020
Source:
University of Pittsburgh
Summary:
The vast way in which you describe your emotions can reveal your
lived experience and wellness status.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Vocabulary that one uses to describe their emotions is an indicator
of mental and physical health and overall well-being, according to an
analysis led by a scientist at the University of Pittsburgh School of
Medicine and published today in Nature Communications. A larger negative emotion vocabulary -- or different ways to describe similar feelings -- correlates with more psychological distress and poorer physical health,
while a larger positive emotion vocabulary correlates with better
well-being and physical health.


==========================================================================
"Our language seems to indicate our expertise with states of emotion
we are more comfortable with," said lead author Vera Vine, Ph.D.,
postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at Pitt. "It looks
like there's a congruency between how many different ways we can name
a feeling and how often and likely we are to experience that feeling."
To examine how emotion vocabulary depth corresponds broadly with lived experience, Vine and her team analyzed public blogs written by more than
35,000 individuals and stream-of-consciousness essays by 1,567 college students. The students also self-reported their moods periodically during
the experiment.

Overall, people who used a wider variety of negative emotion words tended
to display linguistic markers associated with lower well-being -- such as references to illness and being alone -- and reported greater depression
and neuroticism, as well as poorer physical health.

Conversely, those who used a variety of positive emotion words tended to display linguistic markers of well-being -- such as references to leisure activities, achievements and being part of a group -- and reported higher
rates of conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, overall health,
and lower rates of depression and neuroticism.

These findings suggest that an individual's vocabulary may correspond
to emotional experiences, but it does not speak to whether emotion
vocabularies were helpful or harmful in bringing about emotional
experiences.

"There's a lot of excitement right now about expanding people's emotional vocabularies and teaching how to precisely articulate negative feelings,"
Vine said. "While we often hear the phrase, 'name it to tame it' when
referring to negative emotions, I hope this paper can inspire clinical researchers who are developing emotion-labeling interventions for clinical practice, to study the potential pitfalls of encouraging over-labeling of negative emotions, and the potential utility of teaching positive words." During the stream-of-consciousness exercise, Vine and colleagues found
that students who used more names for sadness grew sadder over the course
of the experiment; people who used more names for fear grew more worried;
and people who used more names for anger grew angrier.

"It is likely that people who have had more upsetting life experiences
have developed richer negative emotion vocabularies to describe the
worlds around them," noted James W. Pennebaker, Ph.D., professor of
psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and an author on the
project. "In everyday life, these same people can more readily label
nuanced feelings as negative which may ultimately affect their moods."
A custom open-source software developed by these researchers to help
with emotion vocabulary computation is called "Vocabulate."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Pittsburgh. Note:
Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Vera Vine, Ryan L. Boyd, James W. Pennebaker. Natural emotion
vocabularies as windows on distress and well-being. Nature
Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18349-0 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200910130408.htm

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