From Composure to Catastrophe: Norms of Calmness--Anxiety Associations for 54,000 English Words and Multiword Expressions

Anxiety, the anticipatory unease about a potential negative outcome, is acommon and beneficial human emotion. However, there is still much that is notknown, such as how anxiety relates to our body and how it manifests inlanguage. This is especially pertinent given the increasing impact ofanxiety-related disorders. In this work, we introduce WorryLex, the firstlarge-scale repository of descriptive, population-level, norms of word--anxietyand phrase--anxiety associations. It includes entries for over 44,450 Englishwords and 10,000 multiword expressions (MWEs). We show that the anxietyassociations are highly reliable. We use WorryLex to study a wide variety ofresearch questions, including: the relationship between anxiety and otheremotion constructs, the rate at which children acquire anxiety words, theextent to which the anxiety association of MWEs is compositional, and *when* weare anxious. We show that from ages 1 to 4 children learn more calmness wordsthan anxiety words, and that trend is reversed age 5 onward. We show that ourlevels of anxiety on social media exhibit systematic patterns of rise and fallduring the day -- highest at 8am and lowest around noon. Anxiety is lowest onweekends and highest mid-week. We show that anxiety is highest in past tensesentences and lowest in future tense; and that there is more anxiety insentences with 3rd person pronouns (he, they) posts than 1st and 2nd personpronouns. Finally, we show that using WorryLex alone, one can accurately trackthe change of anxiety in streams of text. The lexicon enables a wide variety ofanxiety-related research in psychology, NLP, public health, and socialsciences.