Reproduce “WorryWords: Norms of Anxiety Association for over 44k English Words” on OpenResearch
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About this paper
Saif M. Mohammad
Researchers at NRC Canada developed WorryWords, the first large-scale, manually annotated lexicon providing anxiety associations for over 44,450 English words. This resource achieves high reliability, demonstrates anxiety's distinct emotional profile beyond valence-arousal-dominance, and accurately tracks anxiety levels in text streams.
Key insights
- Anxiety possesses a distinct emotional profile, showing a moderate negative correlation with valence, mild correlations with arousal and dominance, and the highest correlation with fear among basic emotions.
- The acquisition of emotional vocabulary shifts developmentally, with children learning more calmness words in early years (ages 1-4) before increasingly acquiring anxiety words from age 5 onwards.
- A dedicated anxiety lexicon provides superior performance for tracking anxiety trends in text compared to general emotion or valence-arousal-dominance lexicons.
Summary by alphaXiv.
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