Preliminary Analysis of the Relationship between Language Use and Subjective Well-being

Individuals' language use has been hypothesized as a useful tool for the analysis of psychological aspects. This study examined relationships between language use and their subjective well-being, which consists of life satisfaction and feeling about life. For this, 126 college students wrote an essay and responded to the subjective well-being scale. Then we analyzed their writings through KLIWC (Korean Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) and compared language use between the high and the low groups of subjective well-being. We also examined the relationships between KLIWC factors and the two sub-factors of subjective well being. The results shows that various individual factors of KLIWC reflect participants' subjective well-being and provids preliminary descriptive data on language use and subjective well-being.