Linguistic Reflexes of Well-Being and Happiness in Echo

TL;DR

This study analyzes private microblogs from the ECHO app to connect linguistic patterns with theories of well-being and happiness, revealing that recurrent event types influencing happiness are not well-represented in existing resources.

Contribution

It introduces a linguistic analysis grounded in well-being theories, highlighting gaps in current lexical resources regarding recurrent event types affecting happiness.

Findings

Recurrent event types like OBLIGATION and INCOMPETENCE influence happiness.

Current lexical resources do not capture these recurrent event types.

Linguistic patterns can be linked to well-being theories.

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 assessment 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 microblogs 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.