Affect and Words: An Instrument for the Quantitative Analysis of Emotional Vocabulary in Open-ended Responses.

In a context where emotions play a central role in discussions on psychology and education, the availability of various techniques and resources to assess emotional experience becomes essential. Quantitative language analysis provides a window to emotional experiences, rarely used in Spanish-speaking contexts. This study develops and cross-culturally validates an annotated dictionary of explicit emotional vocabulary, a tool for analyzing affective variables from texts and open-ended responses. A systematic protocol and expert judgment were used to select and annotate 1,041 lexical families (3,051 lemmas and 18,934 words), and pre-recorded hypotheses about the validity of the instrument were tested. Participants, adolescents from Uruguay (n = 1,208, 59% female, age M = 14.4) and Spain (n = 596, 41% female, age M = 15.7), completed Subjective Well-Being (SWB) scales and wrote about their emotional experiences in an open-ended response. The dictionary showed convergence with other instruments and acceptable inter-rater reliability. When applied to open-ended responses, it captured a substantial proportion of the words written by participants and showed significant correlations with SWB in both the Uruguayan and Spanish samples. These results suggest that quantitative analysis of open-ended responses allows the exploration of well-being, and that this freely available instrument is a valid resource for doing so, serving as a complement to quantitative and qualitative approaches for research or intervention purposes.