Embodied emotional expressions for intuitive experience sampling methods: A demographic investigation with Japanese speakers

Abstract

Experience Sampling Method (ESM) is a research procedure for monitoring ever-changing subjective emotions in our daily lives. A typical method asks participants, several times a day, to report and rate their emotions in terms of pre-defined adjective scales (e.g., “2 for sad,” and “5 for happy”). When a scale includes many adjectives, rating time is increased for participants. However, when few adjectives are provided, respondents may struggle to find descriptors that truly match their internal state, making it difficult to express the complex nuances of multiple emotions. This paper reports the development of a novel approach to ESM in which participants choose only a single word that intuitively expresses common emotion categories and intensities with minimal demands on their time. To achieve this capability, we conducted a survey with 14,321 Japanese speakers that presented a list of intuitive and embodied emotional expressions such as mimetics (e.g., “thump-thump”) and interjections (e.g., “wow”) in Japanese, categorized according to the eight primary emotions and three levels of emotional intensity used in the Plutchik model, and asked them to choose the expressions they use in their daily lives. The results showed that the most frequently used expressions were generally consistent irrespective of gender or age, and that people differentiated their use of expressions according to the category and intensity of their emotions. Our findings indicate that it is possible to create a single common list of expressions that can be used by all genders and ages to efficiently and intuitively express nuanced emotions appropriate to their inner states without the person having to think deliberately.