Natural emotion vocabularies as windows on distress and well-being
Vine, Boyd and Pennebaker asked whether the range of emotion words a person actually uses tells you anything about their life. Rather than administering a vocabulary test, they measured the emotion words people produced naturally, first in stream-of-consciousness essays written by more than fifteen hundred students, then in public blogs written by more than thirty-five thousand people. The findings were consistent across both. A richer vocabulary for negative emotions was associated with more psychological distress and poorer physical health; a richer vocabulary for positive emotions was associated with greater wellbeing and better health. The authors read this as support for theories connecting language use to lived experience, on the reasoning that people develop finer distinctions in the territory they spend most time in. The work is correlational and observational, so it cannot say whether the vocabulary reflects the experience or shapes it, and the authors are explicit that clinical implications would require further research.
Vine, Boyd and Pennebaker asked whether the range of emotion words a person actually uses tells you anything about their life. Rather than administering a vocabulary test, they measured the emotion words people produced naturally, first in stream-of-consciousness essays written by more than fifteen hundred students, then in public blogs written by more than thirty-five thousand people. The findings were consistent across both. A richer vocabulary for negative emotions was associated with more psychological distress and poorer physical health; a richer vocabulary for positive emotions was associated with greater wellbeing and better health. The authors read this as support for theories connecting language use to lived experience, on the reasoning that people develop finer distinctions in the territory they spend most time in. The work is correlational and observational, so it cannot say whether the vocabulary reflects the experience or shapes it, and the authors are explicit that clinical implications would require further research.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
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11, 4525. doi:10.1038/s41467-020-18349-0. Richer negative emotion vocabularies were associated with lower mental health, higher neuroticism and depression and worse physical health; richer positive vocabularies with better outcomes. Correlational.
Where we use it
- Why Saying It Out Loud Makes It Feel Smaller, Why We Care
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https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18349-0
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18349-0