Using freely generated labels to assess emotion in everyday life

Katie Hoemann, Me, Caitlin Mills, Laura Allen, Peter Kuppens, Jolie B Wormwood

Here we explored giving people the option to tell us what they were feeling in natural language.

To measure emotion in daily life, studies often prompt participants to repeatedly rate their feelings on a set of prespecified terms. This approach has yielded key findings in the psychological literature yet may not represent how people typically describe their experiences. We used an alternative approach, in which participants labeled their current emotion with at least one word of their choosing.