Fluency generating emotion words correlates with verbal measures but not emotion regulation, alexithymia, or depressive symptoms

Abstract

How do you feel? To answer this question, one must first think of potential emotion words before choosing the best fit. However, we have little insight into how the ability to rapidly bring to mind emotion words—emotion fluency—relates to emotion functioning or general verbal abilities. In this study, we measured emotion fluency by counting how many emotion words participants could generate in 60s. Participants (N = 151 in 2011-2012) also completed a behavioral measure of verbal fluency (i.e., how many words starting with “P” or “J” participants could produce in 60s), a cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation task, and emotion functioning questionnaires. In pre-registered analyses, we found that participants produced more negative emotion words than positive words, and more positive words than neutral words in the emotion fluency task. As hypothesized, emotion fluency was positively related to verbal fluency, but contrary to hypotheses, emotion fluency was not related to self-reported or task-based emotion functioning (e.g., alexithymia, depression, and emotion regulation ability). As such, in community samples, emotion fluency may reflect general cognitive abilities rather than processes crucial to emotional well-being. While emotion fluency as measured here does not track indices of well-being, future research is needed to investigate potential contexts in which verbal fluency for emotion words may be key to emotion regulation.

Emotion word production develops in tandem with general verbal fluency and reveals key dimensions organizing emotion concepts

“…This task is an adaptation of established methods of assessing verbal fluency (i.e., the ability to rapidly produce any words, typically assessed by asking participants to generate as many words as possible in 60 seconds that belong to a specific semantic category or that begin with a specific letter). These prior studies consistently show that emotion fluency and verbal fluency are positively correlated in adults (.30 < rs < .54; Abeare et al, 2017;Camodeca et al, 2021;Hegefeld et al, 2023). Consequently, emotion fluency appears to be strongly related simply to how rapidly people can generate any words.…”

“…Prior research in adults has also consistently found that participants tend to produce more negative words than positive or neutral emotion words during emotion fluency tasks, a tendency known as negative valence bias (Hegefeld et al, 2023;Schrauf & Sanchez, 2004;Zammuner, 2010). A likely explanation of this observation is that English has more negative emotion words than positive or neutral words (Jackson et al, 2021), although it may also be related to the classic literature showing that people typically attend more to negative than positive information (Rozin & Royzman, 2001).…”

“…To examine whether there was any age-related variation in negative valence bias, we calculated the proportion of negative, neutral, and positive emotion words produced relative to each participant's emotion fluency score. Similar to Hegefeld et al, (2023), we computed each participant's negative valence bias by calculating the proportion of emotion words they produced that fell in the negative category.…”

“…If so, demonstrating that these two processes share overlapping developmental trends would add an additional point of evidence that verbal fluency is central to emotion fluency. Indeed, given data showing that verbal fluency and emotion fluency are closely related (Abeare et al, 2017;Camodeca et al, 2021;Hegefeld et al, 2023), our primary hypothesis is that they will follow similar developmental patterns across age. Nonetheless, an alternative hypothesis is that emotion fluency and verbal fluency may decouple.…”

“…Studies have also tested whether emotion fluency might be related to mental health in adults, as facility with emotion words might provide greater efficacy managing one's emotions (Barrett et al, 2001;Erbas et al, 2018;Kalokerinos et al, 2019;Hoemann et al, 2021;Nook, 2021). However, research thus far has shown inconsistent correlations between emotion fluency and psychopathology (Abeare et al, 2017;Camodeca et al, 2021), with a recent preregistered study demonstrating no significant correlations between emotion fluency and depression symptoms, emotion regulation, or alexithymia (Hegefeld et al, 2023). As such, current evidence suggests that emotion fluency primarily indexes verbal abilities, rather than well-being.…”