The Language of Interoception: Examining Embodiment and Emotion Through a Corpus of Body Part Mentions

TL;DR

This study analyzes how body part mentions in natural language relate to emotion, embodiment, and health, revealing their prevalence, emotional charge, and correlation with health outcomes in online texts.

Contribution

It is the first large-scale analysis linking body part mentions in language to emotion and health, using novel corpora and annotation methods.

Findings

BPMs are common in personal narratives and tweets (~5-10%).

Text with BPMs tends to be more emotionally charged.

Strong correlation between body-related language and poorer health outcomes.

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 (~5% to 10% of posts include BPMs) and that their usage patterns vary markedly by time and %geographic 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.