Running head: LINGUISTIC MARKERS IN EMOTIONAL ELABORATION 1 Linguistic Markers of Emotional Elaboration in the Past and the Present in Online Blogs

Online blog data provide numerous benefits over clinical and laboratory studies, including increased sample size and more genuine responses. By investigating the number of feeling words that a blogger uses in a blog sentence, we can characterize the degree to which individuals elaborate on their emotional experiences. In this study, data were obtained from the website, wefeelfine.org, which collects sentences from English language blogs containing the phrases, “I feel”, “I felt”, and other tenses of the verb “feel”. The number of emotion words in each sentence was counted and used as a metric of emotional elaboration. The results show that sentences containing the phrase “felt” included a significantly smaller proportion of emotion adjectives than those sentences that use the words “feel,” “feeling,” or “feels,” but a significantly larger raw number of emotion adjectives than those sentences. This suggests that people write more words generally in the past tense, but the proportion of emotional words is higher in the present.