Emotion vocabulary reflects a state of well-being, the study suggests

According to an analysis led by a scientist from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and published today, the vocabulary to describe their feelings is indicative of mental and physical health and overall well-being. Nature Communications. Large negative emotion vocabulary or different ways to describe similar emotions – more associated with mental anguish and poor physical health, while large positive emotion vocabulary is associated with better well-being and physical health.

“Our language seems to indicate our expertise with emotional states,” said Vera Vine, PhD, lead author, postdoctoral fellow at Pitt’s Department of Psychiatry. “There seems to be a connection between how many different ways we can name a realization and how often and potentially that realization we experience.”

To examine how the vocabulary depth of emotion broadly corresponds to live experience, Vine and his team analyzed public blogs and essays on consciousness written by more than 35,000 individuals by 1,567 college students. Students also periodically self-reported their mood during the experiment.

Overall, people who used a variety of negative emotion words tended to show linguistic markers associated with low well-being, such as in terms of illness and loneliness and reported more depression and neuroticism as well as poor physical health.

In contrast, those who used a variety of positive emotion words displayed linguistic markers of well-being – such as leisure activities, achievements, and references to being part of a group – and reported a high rate of cons, history, extras, acceptability, overall health, and depression and neuroticism. .

These findings suggest that a person’s vocabulary may correspond to emotional experiences, but it does not say whether the emotional words were helpful in bringing out emotional experiences.

“There’s excitement right now about expanding people’s emotional vocabulary and teaching them exactly how to articulate negative emotions,” Wayne said. “We always hear the phrase‘ name it to name it ’when referring to negative emotions, I hope this paper can inspire clinical researchers, developing emotion-labeling interventions for clinical practice, to over-label Can study the potential difficulties of encouraging. The potential usefulness of teaching negative emotions and positive words. “

During the flow of consciousness, Vine and colleagues noticed that students who used more names for sadness grew more sad during the experiment; People who used more names for fear became more concerned; And those who used more names for anger got angry.

“It’s possible that people who have experienced a more troubled life have developed more negative emotion vocabulary to describe the world around them,” said James W., a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Pennebaker, and Ph.D. Was noted. Author on the project. “In everyday life, these same people can more easily label nuanced emotions as negative that ultimately affect their mood.”