Journal article
The Language of Well-Being: Tracking Fluctuations in Emotion Experience Through Everyday Speech
J Sun, ML Kern, HA Schwartz, Y Son, S Vazire
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology | AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC | Published : 2020
DOI: 10.1037/pspp0000244
Open access
Abstract
The words that people use have been found to reflect stable psychological traits, but less is known about the extent to which everyday fluctuations in spoken language reflect transient psychological states. We explored within-person associations between spoken words and self-reported state emotion among 185 participants who wore the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR; an unobtrusive audio recording device) and completed experience sampling reports of their positive and negative emotions 4 times per day for 7 days (1,579 observations). We examined language using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program (LIWC; theoretically created dictionaries) and open-vocabulary themes (clusters of..
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Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
The preparation of this article was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation to Simine Vazire (BCS-1125553). A portion of these findings were presented at the Association for Research in Personality Conference in Sacramento, CA, June 8-June 10, 2017, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Atlanta, Georgia, March 1-3, 2018, and the European Conference on Personality in Zadar, Croatia, July 17-21, 2018. We are grateful to Damien Crone, Rick Robins, Wiebke Bleidorn, Chris Hopwood, and Matthias Mehl for comments on a draft of this article, and to the many research assistants who ran participants and transcribed the EAR recordings. The quantitative data, R scripts, and Mplus input and output files required to reproduce the analyses reported in this article are available at https://osf.io/3jkhu/. Codebooks for all measures in the larger study are available at https://osf.io/akbfj.