@inproceedings{wu-etal-2025-language,
    title = "The Language of Interoception: Examining Embodiment and Emotion Through a Corpus of Body Part Mentions",
    author = "Wu, Sophie  and
      Wahle, Jan Philip  and
      Mohammad, Saif M.",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.1269/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.1269",
    pages = "23375--23399",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
    abstract = "This paper is the first investigation of the connection between emotion, embodiment, and everyday language in a large sample of natural language data. We created corpora of body part mentions (BPMs) in online English text (blog posts and tweets). This includes a subset featuring human annotations for the emotions of the person whose body part is mentioned in the text. We show that BPMs are common in personal narratives and tweets ({\textasciitilde}5{\%} to 10{\%} of posts include BPMs) and that their usage patterns vary markedly by time and location. Using word{--}emotion association lexicons and our annotated data, we show that text containing BPMs tends to be more emotionally charged, even when the BPM is not explicitly used to describe a physical reaction to the emotion in the text. Finally, we discover a strong and statistically significant correlation between body-related language and a variety of poorer health outcomes. In sum, we argue that investigating the role of body-part related words in language can open up valuable avenues of future research at the intersection of NLP, the affective sciences, and the study of human wellbeing."
}