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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03966 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03966/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.6297/) (2013)
- [Word Affect Intensities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08798/) (2017)
- [Best Practices in the Creation and Use of Emotion Lexicons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07206/) (2022)
- [From Once Upon a Time to Happily Ever After: Tracking Emotions in Novels and Fairy Tales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.5909/) (2013)
- [Evaluating Emotion Arcs Across Languages: Bridging the Global Divide in Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02213/) (2023)
- [Attention-Based LSTM for Psychological Stress Detection from Spoken Language Using Distant Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12307/) (2018)
- [Happiness and the Patterns of Life: A Study of Geolocated Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1304.1296/) (2013)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11926/) (2025)
- [NRC VAD Lexicon v2: Norms for Valence, Arousal, and Dominance for over 55k English Terms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23547/) (2025)
- [SemEval-2025 Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07269/) (2025)
- [Figurative-cum-Commonsense Knowledge Infusion for Multimodal Mental Health Meme Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15321/) (2025)
- [Words of Warmth: Trust and Sociability Norms for over 26k English Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03993/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Review of Datasets for Clinical Mental Health AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09809/) (2025)
- [Do Schwartz Higher-Order Values Help Sentence-Level Human Value Detection? A Study of Hierarchical Gating and Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00913/) (2026)
- [Breaking Bad: Norms for Valence, Arousal, and Dominance for over 10k English Multiword Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19816/) (2025)
- [When are We Worried? Temporal Trends of Anxiety and What They Reveal about Us](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10400/) (2026)
- [From Trial by Fire To Sleep Like a Baby: A Lexicon of Anxiety Associations for 20k English Multiword Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18692/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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. http://saifmohammad.com/worrywords.html