# Words of Warmth: Trust and Sociability Norms for over 26k English Words

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03993 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03993/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [Examining Gender and Race Bias in Two Hundred Sentiment Analysis Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04508/) (2018)
- [Assessing Social and Intersectional Biases in Contextualized Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01485/) (2019)
- [Best Practices in the Creation and Use of Emotion Lexicons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07206/) (2022)
- [NRC VAD Lexicon v2: Norms for Valence, Arousal, and Dominance for over 55k English Terms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23547/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Emotion Arcs Across Languages: Bridging the Global Divide in Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02213/) (2023)
- [WorryWords: Norms of Anxiety Association for over 44k English Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03966/) (2024)
- [STOP! Benchmarking Large Language Models with Sensitivity Testing on Offensive Progressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13843/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Affect, Body, Cognition, Demographics, and Emotion: The ABCDE of Text Features for Computational Affective Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17752/) (2025)
- [The Shifting Landscape of Vaccine Discourse: Insights From a Decade of Pre- to Post-COVID-19 Vaccine Posts on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16832/) (2025)
- [Annotating Dimensions of Social Perception in Text: A Sentence-Level Dataset of Warmth and Competence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06316/) (2026)
- [Not What, But How: A Framework for Auditing LLM Responses across Positioning, Generalization, Anthropomorphism, and Maxims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02493/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social psychologists have shown that Warmth (W) and Competence (C) are the primary dimensions along which we assess other people and groups. These dimensions impact various aspects of our lives from social competence and emotion regulation to success in the work place and how we view the world. More recent work has started to explore how these dimensions develop, why they have developed, and what they constitute. Of particular note, is the finding that warmth has two distinct components: Trust (T) and Sociability (S). In this work, we introduce Words of Warmth, the first large-scale repository of manually derived word--warmth (as well as word--trust and word--sociability) associations for over 26k English words. We show that the associations are highly reliable. We use the lexicons to study the rate at which children acquire WCTS words with age. Finally, we show that the lexicon enables a wide variety of bias and stereotype research through case studies on various target entities. Words of Warmth is freely available at: http://saifmohammad.com/warmth.html