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words. On the surface, this sounds like a simple task. If people are happy, they should use happy words. If sad, they should use sad words. If only it were this easy. Counting emotion words is a fine start to measuring feelings but these approaches miss the central point: Emotions affect the ways people think. If we could just come up with a way to measure the ways people think, we could come up with a richer way to study and understand emotions. There is just such a way. Function words do a fine job of tracking people’s thinking styles. It should come as no surprise that these same words can provide insight into people’s emotional states as well.

DIFFERENT EMOTIONS, DIFFERENT WAYS OF THINKING

A good starting point is to consider three distinct emotions: happiness, sadness, and anger. We all agree that these are common emotional states that have their own distinct physical and psychological feelings. These different emotions also cause us to look at the world differently. When thinking about emotions and words, it can be instructive to see how poets write. After all, poets spend much of their time writing about their emotional reactions. Do poets use function words differently when writing about happiness, sadness, and anger? Look at some of the work by Edna St. Vincent Millay, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Writing in the first half of the twentieth century, Millay was celebrated as a free spirit who wrote powerfully about love, loss, and relationships. Compare the ways she uses words in lines from the poems on the following page.

The examples from Millay illustrate what researchers have found. When writing about positive experiences people tend to use we-words at particularly high rates. People who are happy are also more specific, relying on concrete nouns and references to particular times and places. Other studies find that positive moods change people’s perspectives so that they look at the world in a more open way—sometimes referred to as the broaden-and-build way of thinking. Sadness generally causes people to focus inwardly. Pronouns tend to track people’s focus of attention, and when in great emotional or physical pain, they tend to use I-words at high rates. Sadness, unlike most other emotions, is associated with looking back in the past and into the future. In other words, people tend to use past- and future-tense verbs more when they are sad or depressed compared to other strong emotions.

Although classified as a negative emotion, anger has a completely different profile than sadness. When angry, people focus on others and rarely themselves. In addition to using high rates of second-person (e.g., you) and third-person (he, she, they) pronouns, angry people talk and think in the present tense.

When events happen to us that cause us to feel sad or angry, we tend to try to understand why they occurred. We use cognitive words that reflect causal thinking and self-reflection. Not true for positive emotions such as pride and love. When happy and content, most of us are satisfied to let the joy wash over us without introspection. In other words, negative feelings make us thoughtful; positive emotions make us blissfully stupid.

Most of the studies that have examined transient emotions in the laboratory have relied on asking college students to write about powerful events that had elicited feelings of happiness, sadness, or anger. The lab studies serve as a helpful road map by which to understand how we all feel and express emotions in the real world.

PRONOUNS AND MISERY: THE LANGUAGE OF SUICIDAL POETS

In any given year, over 5 percent of all adults experience a major depression. Depressive episodes are associated with physical health problems, breakdowns in people’s social and work lives, and greater risk of suicide. A number of factors are known to influence the likelihood of depression, including major life upheavals, genetic predispositions, and social isolation. One particularly prominent theory of depression argues that when people become depressed, they tend to