The researchers investigated the relationship between individuals' actively used emotion vocabularies and their emotional functioning. They analyzed stream-of-consciousness essays by 1,567 college students and public blogs written by over 35,000 individuals. The studies showed that emotion vocabulary richness corresponds broadly with experience, with larger negative emotion vocabularies correlating with more psychological distress and poorer physical health, while larger positive emotion vocabularies correlate with higher well-being and better physical health. The findings suggest that language use is linked to lived experience and may have future clinical implications.
Read the research: Natural emotion vocabularies as windows on distress and well-being
