Lexical‐Semantic Properties of Freely Generated Everyday Emotion Labels and Self‐Reported Alexithymia: A Preregistered Secondary Analysis

ABSTRACT

Alexithymia—difficulty identifying and describing one's feelings—is thought to involve emotion language, and reviews indicate the two are related; however, the relation varies with what aspect of language is measured. Whether the meanings of the emotion words people spontaneously use in daily life relate to alexithymic difficulties remains unclear. In an existing dataset, 50 adults freely generated words for their current feelings across roughly 14 days of ambulatory experience sampling and completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS‐20) before and after. Labels retained by a preregistered lexicon filter were assigned external norm ratings of how strongly a word's meaning is typically experienced through sensations inside the body, plus action‐effector strength, and concreteness. A corpus‐based index of association with independently defined interoceptive terms covered a subset. These are properties of words, supplied by independent norming samples and corpora, not measures of participants' own interoceptive ability. Values were averaged within participants, weighted by how often each label was used, and related to the TAS‐20 difficulty‐identifying‐feelings and difficulty‐describing‐feelings subscales, adjusting for vocabulary quantity, valence, and arousal. All eight primary estimates were negative, but none survived correction for multiple testing. The clearest concerned difficulty describing feelings; participants reporting greater difficulty tended to repeatedly use labels with somewhat lower norm‐rated interoceptive strength (standardized β  ≈ −0.27). Confidence intervals spanned associations close to zero as well as those of potentially meaningful magnitude. The pattern changed substantially when each distinct word was counted once rather than weighted by frequency of use, including changes in direction for the interoceptive‐strength estimates. In this small sample, the meanings of everyday emotion labels showed a suggestive but uncertain relation to self‐reported difficulty describing feelings. The findings describe properties of the words people use—not their capacity to sense bodily signals—and show that such conclusions depend on how vocabulary is aggregated.