# From Trial by Fire To Sleep Like a Baby: A Lexicon of Anxiety Associations for 20k English Multiword Expressions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18692 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18692/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2026.

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

- [Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.6297/) (2013)
- [Metaphor Understanding Challenge Dataset for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11810/) (2024)
- [Best Practices in the Creation and Use of Emotion Lexicons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07206/) (2022)
- [WorryWords: Norms of Anxiety Association for over 44k English Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03966/) (2024)
- [Idioms-Proverbs Lexicon for Modern Standard Arabic and Colloquial Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01906/) (2015)
- [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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Anxiety is the unease about a possible future negative outcome. In recent years, there has been growing interest in understanding how anxiety relates to our health, well-being, body, mind, and behaviour. This includes work on lexical resources for word-anxiety association. However, there is very little anxiety-related work on larger units of text such as multiword expressions (MWE). Here, we introduce the first large-scale lexicon capturing descriptive norms of anxiety associations for more than 20k English MWEs. We show that the anxiety associations are highly reliable. We use the lexicon to study prevalence of different types of anxiety- and calmness-associated MWEs; and how that varies across two-, three-, and four-word sequences. We also study the extent to which the anxiety association of MWEs is compositional (due to its constituent words). The lexicon enables a wide variety of anxiety-related research in psychology, NLP, public health, and social sciences. The lexicon is freely available: https://saifmohammad.com/worrylex.html