Resumen de Linguistic Reflexes of Well-Being and Happiness in Echo
Jiaqi Wu, Marilyn A. Walker, Pranav Anand, Steve Whittaker
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 assess- ments of our competence, autonomy and social connection. And surveys that mea- sure happiness empirically note that peo- ple require their basic needs to be met for food and shelter, but beyond that tend to be happiest when socializing, eating or hav- ing sex. We analyze a corpus of private micro-blogs from a well-being application called ECHO, where users label each writ- ten post about daily events with a happi- ness 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 exam- ine 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 IN- COMPETENCE, which affect people’s feel- ings of well-being are not captured in cur- rent lexical or semantic resources.
