Emotion language in context: A longitudinal, multi-modal investigation of meaning-making in everyday life and its association with expertise and well-being

Some people are more skilled than others in how they understand and experience emotion: they have greater expertise in emotion. These individuals have better mental, physical, and relational well-being because they make emotional meaning that is context-specific and tailored to the situation at hand, helping them to regulate and cope in healthier ways. Language is a key means of gaining insight into emotional meaning-making. However, research often studies emotion language in a decontextualized manner – focusing only on emotion words, ignoring situational information, and sampling for limited timespans. This approach limits our understanding of expertise as context-specific meaning-making and its ties to well-being. This project puts emotion language back in context by using in-the-moment descriptions of experience to examine multiple features of language, their patterns of use over time and relationship to the physical and social environment. To do this, I create a toolbox that uses experience sampling and mobile sensing to collect data on real-world emotional experiences, together with computational linguistic and network analytic techniques to yield psychologically interpretable models of emotion language in context. This toolbox is a crucial innovation that allows me to link linguistic features to situation-specific dynamics, leading to a more profound understanding of how people make emotional meaning in everyday life and which ways are associated with better outcomes.