Emotions and the Structure of the Language

Emotions have an impact on almost every facet of human life - from daily behavior going to work efficiency, everyday decisions, human interactions, as well as human health. Humans express their emotions through the use of language and the things that people say do affect our emotions, but can these emotions affect the structure of the language? And if so, to what extent? Do people speak more or less when they experience certain emotions? Do emotions affect the selection of the grammar? For example, are people more likely to use verbs rather than nouns when experiencing a certain emotion? Do emotions influence the transition between grammars? The aim of this paper is to contribute to the answers of the aforementioned questions by computationally analyzing emotionally rich text. The paper proposes the use of Natural Language Processing techniques to investigate the relation between emotions and language. Results show that emotions affect the length of text and to a lesser degree the tendency toward choosing some parts of speech (i.e. nouns vs verbs). For the structure of the sentence and the transition between grammatical categories, the influence of emotions is negligible.