WorryWords: Norms of Anxiety Association for over 44k English Words

Anxiety, the anticipatory unease about a potential negative outcome, is a common and beneficial human emotion. However, there is still much that is not known, such as how anxiety relates to our body and how it manifests in language. This is especially pertinent given the increasing impact of anxiety-related disorders. In this work, we introduce WorryWords, the first large-scale repository of manually derived word-anxiety associations for over 44,450 English words. We show that the anxiety associations are highly reliable. We use WorryWords to study the relationship between anxiety and other emotion constructs, as well as the rate at which children acquire anxiety words with age. Finally, we show that using WorryWords alone, one can accurately track the change of anxiety in streams of text. The lexicon enables a wide variety of anxiety-related research in psychology, NLP, public health, and social sciences. WorryWords (and its translations to over 100 languages) is freely available.