Developing and Validating the Self-Transcendent Emotion Dictionary for Textual Analysis

Recent years have seen a growing amount of research effort directed toward what positive media psychologists refer to as self-transcendent emotions, such as awe, admiration, elevation, gratitude, inspiration, and hope. While these emotions are invaluable to promote greater human connectedness, prosociality, and human flourishing, researchers are constrained in terms of analyzing self-transcendent emotions as expressed in spoken and written languages. Drawing upon the word-counting approach of the text analysis paradigm, this project aimed at constructing a dictionary tool—Self-Transcendent Emotion Dictionary (STED)—which can be uploaded into mainstream, text analytic software (e.g., LIWC) to identify and analyze self-transcendent emotions in large corpora. This dictionary tool was then refined and validated via three studies, where individual words were first rated with regard to their fitness into the proposed construct (Step 1), and then used to analyze essays written to reflect corresponding construct (Step 2). Finally, the refined dictionary was applied to examine words used in nearly 4,000 human-coded <i>New York Times</i> articles (Step 3). Results indicated that the final dictionary, consists of 351 lexicons and phrases, does come with acceptable face and construct validity, and possesses reasonable level of external validity and applicability. Despite its notable shortcoming in accounting for the rhetorical techniques ingrained in natural human language, the STED could be instrumental for social scientific inquiry of positive emotions in textual narratives.