EMOTION NETWORKS: A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC AND NETWORK SCIENCE APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS.

Abstract

Psychological distress is complexly associated with emotional processes that are subsequently predictive of physical and psychological wellbeing. These associations to emotions have been echoed in language use of individuals in distress, yet the precise nature of the affective language of distress remains unclear. With computational advancements, network science and psycholinguistic approaches offer opportunities to further understand psychological distress, language and emotions. This study utilizes a novel cross-disciplinary approach to map the emotional lexicon and analyse its associations to psychological distress. 264 English-speaking undergraduates completed an emotion verbal fluency task and self- reported distress questionnaire. Z-tests were conducted on emotional lexicon content (e.g., arousal, valence, verbal productivity) of individuals with elevated distress and the full recruited sample. Network estimation techniques were utilized to construct emotion networks from individuals with elevated distress. 10,000 emotion networks constructed from 10,000 randomly sampled groups from full recruited sample form a null distribution. Binomial tests were conducted on measures of emotional lexicon network structure and organization (e.g., modularity, interconnectivity, centrality) in individuals with elevated distress and null distribution. Emotional lexicon content did not significantly differ. However, individuals with elevated distress exhibited differences in network structure and organization; specifically, (a) less overall network connectivity, indicating less accessibility to emotional concepts overall, (b) greater modularity, indicating increased difficulties traversing out of certain emotion concepts (i.e., “fear”, “upset”), and (c) different patterns of connectivity in specific emotions. Implications to the understanding of emotion and distress, and potential applications to future clinical research are discussed.