Emotion Granularity from Text: An Aggregate-Level Indicator of Mental Health

Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Daniela Teodorescu, Mallory Feldman, Kristen Lindquist, Saif Mohammad


Abstract
We are united in how emotions are central to shaping our experiences; yet, individuals differ greatly in how we each identify, categorize, and express emotions. In psychology, variation in the ability of individuals to differentiate between emotion concepts is called emotion granularity (determined through self-reports of one’s emotions). High emotion granularity has been linked with better mental and physical health; whereas low emotion granularity has been linked with maladaptive emotion regulation strategies and poor health outcomes. In this work, we propose computational measures of emotion granularity derived from temporally-ordered speaker utterances in social media (in lieu of self reports that suffer from various biases). We then investigate the effectiveness of such text-derived measures of emotion granularity in functioning as markers of various mental health conditions (MHCs). We establish baseline measures of emotion granularity derived from textual utterances, and show that, at an aggregate level, emotion granularities are significantly lower for people self-reporting as having an MHC than for the control population. This paves the way towards a better understanding of the MHCs, and specifically the role emotions play in our well-being.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.1069
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19168–19185
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1069
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Daniela Teodorescu, Mallory Feldman, Kristen Lindquist, and Saif Mohammad. 2024. Emotion Granularity from Text: An Aggregate-Level Indicator of Mental Health. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 19168–19185, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Emotion Granularity from Text: An Aggregate-Level Indicator of Mental Health (Vishnubhotla et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1069.pdf