Determining the Intensity of Basic Emotions among People Suffering from Anorexia Nervosa Based on Free Statements about Their Body

Objective: This study sought to address one of the challenges of psychiatry-computer aided diagnosis and therapy of anorexia nervosa. The goal of the paper is to present a method of determining the intensity of five emotions (happiness, sadness, anxiety, anger and disgust) in medical notes, which was then used to analyze the feelings of people suffering from anorexia nervosa. In total, 96 notes were researched (46 from people suffering from anorexia and 52 from healthy people). Method: The developed solution allows a comprehensive assessment of the intensity of five feelings (happiness, sadness, anxiety, anger and disgust) occurring in text notes. This method implements Nencki Affective Word List dictionary extension, in which the original version has a limited vocabulary. The method was tested on a group of patients suffering from anorexia nervosa and a control group (healthy people without an eating disorder). Of the analyzed medical, only 8% of the words are in the original dictionary. Results: As a result of the study, two emotional profiles were obtained: one pattern for a healthy person and one for a person suffering from anorexia nervosa. Comparing the average emotional intensity in profiles of a healthy person and person with a disorder, a higher value of happiness intensity is noticeable in the profile of a healthy person than in the profile of a person with an illness. The opposite situation occurs with other emotions (sadness, anxiety, disgust, anger); they reach higher values in the case of the profile of a person suffering from anorexia nervosa. Discussion: The presented method can be used when observing the patient’s progress during applied therapy. It allows us to state whether the chosen method has a positive effect on the mental state of the patient, and if his emotional profile is similar to the emotional profile of a healthy person. The method can also be used during first diagnosis visit.

Socio-Affective Word Production by Early Childhood Educators: Lexical Densities, Clusters, and Predictors

This article presents a quantitative characterization of the language of early childhood educators, with the goal of identifying their lexical preferences and typical uses in the socio-affective domain. In this cross-sectional, descriptive study, 20 participants were selected by convenience sampling and provided continuous audio recordings, which were transcribed and categorized using LIWC2015 software. The findings show that the greatest lexical densities are associated with the categories “cognitive processes”, “relativity”, “social processes”, “affective processes”, and “perceptual processes”, and a number of subcategories like “motion” and “positive emotion”. Lower densities were found in “anxiety”, “sadness”, health”, “religion”, and “death”. Furthermore, two commonly used clusters were identified: one centered on words with an emotional connotation, and another centered on words with a social connotation. Lastly, the categories “body”, “health”, “motion”, “ingestion”, “causation”, “exclusion”, and “sexual” are good predictors of socio-affective word production. Our findings suggest a distinctive and prominent use of a number of semantic categories associated with the socio-affective domain. Future research directions and their potential to contribute to formative processes in early childhood education are also discussed.

Can emotional expressivity and writing content predict beneficial effects of expressive writing among breast cancer patients receiving chemotherapy? A secondary analysis of randomized controlled trial data from China

Background To explore whether emotional expressivity and the patterns of language use could predict benefits from expressive writing (EW) of breast cancer (BC) patients in a culture that strongly discourages emotional disclosure. Methods Data were obtained from a recent trial in which we compared the health outcomes between a prolonged EW group (12 sessions) and a standard EW group (four sessions) (n = 56 per group) of BC patients receiving chemotherapy. The Chinese texts were tokenized using the THU Lexical Analyser for Chinese. Then, LIWC2015 was used to quantify positive and negative affect word use. Results Our first hypothesis that BC patients with higher levels of emotional expressivity tended to use higher levels of positive and negative affect words in texts was not supported (r = 0.067, p = 0.549 and r = 0.065, p = 0.559, respectively). The level of emotional expressivity has a significant effect on the quality of life (QOL), and those who used more positive or fewer negative affective words in texts had a better QOL (all p < 0.05). However, no significant difference was identified in physical and psychological well-being (all p > 0.05). Furthermore, the patterns of affective word use during EW did not mediate the effects of emotional expressivity on health outcomes (all p > 0.05). Conclusions Our findings suggest that the level of emotional expressivity and the pattern of affective word use could be factors that may moderate the effects of EW on QOL, which may help clinicians identify the individuals most likely to benefit from such writing exercises in China.

Emotionality effects in ambiguous word recognition: The crucial role of the affective congruence between distinct meanings of ambiguous words

There is substantial evidence that affectively charged words (e.g., party or gun) are processed differently from neutral words (e.g., pen), although there are also inconsistent findings in the field. Some lexical or semantic variables might explain such inconsistencies, due to the possible modulation of affective word processing by these variables. The aim of the present study was to examine the extent to which affective word processing is modulated by semantic ambiguity. We conducted a large lexical decision study including semantically ambiguous words (e.g., cataract) and semantically unambiguous words (e.g., terrorism), analysing the extent to which reaction times (RTs) were influenced by their affective properties. The findings revealed a valence effect in which positive valence made RTs faster, whereas negative valence slowed them. The valence effect diminished as the semantic ambiguity of words increased. This decrease did not affect all ambiguous words, but was observed mainly in ambiguous words with incongruent affective meanings. These results highlight the need to consider the affective properties of the distinct meanings of ambiguous words in research on affective word processing.