Using Natural Language Processing to Track Negative Emotions in the Daily Lives of Adolescents

Tracking emotion fluctuations in adolescents’ daily lives is essential for understanding mood dynamics and identifying early markers of affective disorders. This study examines the potential of text-based approaches for emotion prediction by comparing nomothetic (group-level) and idiographic (individualized) models in predicting adolescents’ daily negative affect (NA) from text features. Additionally, we evaluate different Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for capturing within-person emotion fluctuations. We analyzed ecological momentary assessment (EMA) text responses from 97 adolescents (ages 14-18, 77.3% female, 22.7% male, N _EMA =7,680). Text features were extracted using a dictionary-based approach, topic modeling, and GPT-derived emotion ratings. Random Forest and Elastic Net Regression models predicted NA from these text features, comparing nomothetic and idiographic approaches. All key findings, interactive visualizations, and model comparisons are available via a companion web app: https://emotracknlp.streamlit.app/. Idiographic models combining text features from different NLP approaches exhibited the best performance: they performed comparably to nomothetic models in R² but yielded lower prediction error (Root Mean Squared Error), improving within-person precision. Importantly, there were substantial between-person differences in model performance and predictive linguistic features. When selecting the best-performing model for each participant, significant correlations between predicted and observed emotion scores were found for 90.7–94.8% of participants. Our findings suggest that while nomothetic models offer initial scalability, idiographic models may provide greater predictive precision with sufficient within-person data. A flexible, personalized approach that selects the optimal model for each individual may enhance emotion monitoring, while leveraging text data to provide contextual insights that could inform appropriate interventions.