Linguistic Reflexes of Well-Being and Happiness in Echo

Jiaqi Wu, Marilyn Walker, Pranav Anand, Steve Whittaker

Abstract
Different theories posit different sources for feelings of well-being and happiness. Appraisal theory grounds our emotional responses in our goals and desires and their fulfillment, or lack of fulfillment. Self-Determination theory posits that the basis for well-being rests on our assessments of our competence, autonomy and social connection. And surveys that measure happiness empirically note that people require their basic needs to be met for food and shelter, but beyond that tend to be happiest when socializing, eating or having sex. We analyze a corpus of private micro-blogs from a well-being application called Echo, where users label each written post about daily events with a happiness score between 1 and 9. Our goal is to ground the linguistic descriptions of events that users experience in theories of well-being and happiness, and then examine the extent to which different theoretical accounts can explain the variance in the happiness scores. We show that recurrent event types, such as obligation and incompetence, which affect people’s feelings of well-being are not captured in current lexical or semantic resources.
Anthology ID:
W17-5211
Volume:
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Alexandra Balahur, Saif M. Mohammad, Erik van der Goot
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
81–91
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5211
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-5211
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiaqi Wu, Marilyn Walker, Pranav Anand, and Steve Whittaker. 2017. Linguistic Reflexes of Well-Being and Happiness in Echo. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 81–91, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Linguistic Reflexes of Well-Being and Happiness in Echo (Wu et al., WASSA 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/W17-5211.pdf
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