# The Language of Interoception: Examining Embodiment and Emotion Through a Corpus of Body Part Mentions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16189 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16189/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.6297/) (2013)
- [Best Practices in the Creation and Use of Emotion Lexicons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07206/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Emotion Arcs Across Languages: Bridging the Global Divide in Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02213/) (2023)
- [Emotion Granularity from Text: An Aggregate-Level Indicator of Mental Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02281/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Affect, Body, Cognition, Demographics, and Emotion: The ABCDE of Text Features for Computational Affective Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17752/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper is the first investigation of the connection between emotion, embodiment, and everyday language in a large sample of natural language data. We created corpora of body part mentions (BPMs) in online English text (blog posts and tweets). This includes a subset featuring human annotations for the emotions of the person whose body part is mentioned in the text. We show that BPMs are common in personal narratives and tweets (~5% to 10% of posts include BPMs) and that their usage patterns vary markedly by time and %geographic location. Using word-emotion association lexicons and our annotated data, we show that text containing BPMs tends to be more emotionally charged, even when the BPM is not explicitly used to describe a physical reaction to the emotion in the text. Finally, we discover a strong and statistically significant correlation between body-related language and a variety of poorer health outcomes. In sum, we argue that investigating the role of body-part related words in language can open up valuable avenues of future research at the intersection of NLP, the affective sciences, and the study of human wellbeing.