waif
What am I feeling?
Write something — a message you have not sent, a note to yourself, anything. You get the feeling, what you are doing with it, and every number behind it.
· sure of the family
—
- Heavily negative
- Negative
- Level
- Positive
- Strongly positive
- Shut down
- Subdued
- Steady
- Keyed up
- At full pitch
- Powerless
- Little control
- Some say in it
- Steady grip
- In charge
Every question it was asked, every option it could have picked, and where it put the probability.
How pleasant or unpleasant is the feeling behind the text?
Starts the sentence and draws the meter. It does not pick the word.
- As unpleasant as misery or grief: pain or despair runs through the whole of it—
- As unpleasant as sorrow or confusion: low spirits, unease, something gone wrong—
- Neither pleasant nor unpleasant: flat and factual, or pulling both ways at once—
- As pleasant as contentment or relief: warmth, ease, something come right—
- As pleasant as joy or delight: elation, love, the best of news—
How activated is the person writing the text — shut down and still, or keyed up?
Starts the sentence and draws the meter. It does not pick the word.
- As still as calm or serenity: nothing moving, settled or drained—
- As low-energy as boredom or sadness: quiet and slow—
- As activated as relief or nostalgia: ordinary, neither stirred nor unusually still—
- As activated as frustration or anger: tense or animated, energy clearly raised—
- As activated as rage or panic: frantic or overwhelmed, hard to contain—
How much say does the person writing the text feel they have over what is happening?
Starts the sentence and draws the meter. It does not pick the word.
- As powerless as panic or terror: carried along with no options left—
- As powerless as anxiety or worry: struggling to keep any grip on it—
- In between, as with disgust or regret: some say in it, but not much—
- As in command as confidence or pride: a steady grip on the situation—
- As in command as calm or peace: fully settled, deciding what happens next—
Which family does the feeling behind the text belong to? Pick the family, not the exact shade.
Picks the word, together with the shade below. Nothing else does.
- Anger — Something is wrong and someone is at fault—
- Fear — Something bad may be coming—
- Sadness — Something is lost or gone wrong and cannot be undone—
- Shame — The fault is their own—
- Aversion — Repelled by something, or resenting what someone else has—
- Joy — Something good has happened or is happening—
- Affection — Warmth towards a particular person—
- Calm — Settled and at ease, or a weight lifted—
- Flat — No feeling has much hold—
- Looking ahead — Turned towards something not yet here—
- Startled — Caught off guard by something unexpected—
Which shade of anger is it exactly?
Picks the word. Asked for all eleven families at once, on eleven different assumptions; only this one is read. Where it does not separate and two options hold the weight between them, both are named.
- annoyance — A small thing, quickly over—
- irritation — Grating, repeated, wearing—
- frustration — Blocked from something they are trying to do—
- resentment — An old grievance still carried—
- anger — Squarely angry at someone or something—
- outrage — Angry at something that should not be allowed—
- rage — Past words; wants to break something—
- hatred — Settled, lasting ill will—
Which shade of fear is it exactly?
Picks the word. Asked for all eleven families at once, on eleven different assumptions; only this one is read. Where it does not separate and two options hold the weight between them, both are named.
- dread — A bad thing is coming and cannot be avoided—
- anxiety — Keyed up about something that might go wrong—
- worry — Turning a possible bad outcome over and over—
- fear — Afraid of something specific and present—
- terror — Overwhelmed by fear—
- panic — Fear that has taken over action—
Which shade of sadness is it exactly?
Picks the word. Asked for all eleven families at once, on eleven different assumptions; only this one is read. Where it does not separate and two options hold the weight between them, both are named.
- disappointment — Hoped for something and did not get it—
- sadness — Plainly sad—
- loneliness — Sad at being unaccompanied—
- sorrow — Deep, settled sadness—
- grief — Sad at a loss that cannot be undone—
- misery — Sustained wretchedness—
- despair — Sad and out of hope—
Which shade of shame is it exactly?
Picks the word. Asked for all eleven families at once, on eleven different assumptions; only this one is read. Where it does not separate and two options hold the weight between them, both are named.
- regret — Wishes they had done otherwise—
- guilt — Did something wrong to someone—
- embarrassment — Exposed in front of others, socially—
- shame — Something wrong with them, not just the act—
- humiliation — Degraded by someone else—
Which shade of aversion is it exactly?
Picks the word. Asked for all eleven families at once, on eleven different assumptions; only this one is read. Where it does not separate and two options hold the weight between them, both are named.
- envy — Wants what someone else has—
- jealousy — Afraid of losing something to someone else—
- disgust — Repelled by something—
Which shade of joy is it exactly?
Picks the word. Asked for all eleven families at once, on eleven different assumptions; only this one is read. Where it does not separate and two options hold the weight between them, both are named.
- amusement — Finds it funny—
- pride — Pleased with something they or theirs achieved—
- optimism — Expects things to go well—
- excitement — Keyed-up eagerness—
- delight — Sharp, immediate pleasure—
- joy — Deep, full happiness—
Which shade of affection is it exactly?
Picks the word. Asked for all eleven families at once, on eleven different assumptions; only this one is read. Where it does not separate and two options hold the weight between them, both are named.
- sympathy — Feels for someone's difficulty—
- tenderness — Gentle, protective warmth—
- nostalgia — Warmth for something past—
- gratitude — Thankful to someone for something done—
- compassion — Moved to care by someone's suffering—
- affection — Fond of someone—
- love — Loves them—
Which shade of calm is it exactly?
Picks the word. Asked for all eleven families at once, on eleven different assumptions; only this one is read. Where it does not separate and two options hold the weight between them, both are named.
- contentment — Satisfied with how things are—
- satisfaction — Pleased a thing is done or right—
- relief — A weight has just lifted—
- confidence — Sure of themselves—
- peace — Untroubled—
- serenity — Deeply still—
- calm — Not agitated—
Which shade of flat is it exactly?
Picks the word. Asked for all eleven families at once, on eleven different assumptions; only this one is read. Where it does not separate and two options hold the weight between them, both are named.
- indifference — Does not care either way—
- apathy — Cannot summon caring—
- boredom — Nothing here holds interest—
- emptiness — Feels hollowed out—
- fatigue — Worn down—
- exhaustion — Nothing left at all—
Which shade of looking_ahead is it exactly?
Picks the word. Asked for all eleven families at once, on eleven different assumptions; only this one is read. Where it does not separate and two options hold the weight between them, both are named.
- anticipation — Waiting for something coming—
- curiosity — Wants to find out—
- desire — Wants something—
- hope — Wants it and it might happen—
- determination — Has decided and will see it through—
Which shade of startled is it exactly?
Picks the word. Asked for all eleven families at once, on eleven different assumptions; only this one is read. Where it does not separate and two options hold the weight between them, both are named.
- surprise — Caught off guard—
- awe — Struck by something larger than them—
What is the person writing the text doing with it — what is the act, regardless of how they feel?
Finishes the sentence. It does not affect the word.
- venting — Getting it out. No answer is wanted and none would help—
- asking for help — Requesting practical help, an answer, or a favour—
- seeking reassurance — Asking to be told it is alright, or that they judged it correctly—
- confronting — Calling someone out, accusing, or holding them to something—
- thanking — Thanking, appreciating, or telling someone they mattered—
- deciding — Announcing or working towards a decision they are committing to—
- telling you what happened — Stating what happened or what is planned, informationally—
- thinking it through — Thinking aloud, turning something over, working it out on the page—
The text is something a person actually wrote — a message, a note, a thought — rather than gibberish, a random string, or a meaningless fragment.
A gate. Below 0.50 nothing is scored and no reading is shown.
- yes—
- no—
Seven answers, three jobs
They do not all do the same thing, and only two of them choose the word.
| Family, then shade | The word. Nothing else picks it |
| Valence, arousal, control | The sentence, and the three meters |
| Intent | The end of that sentence |
| Is this writing at all | A gate — below 0.50 nothing is scored |
The axes used to pick the word too. The scores further down are why they no longer do.
Three axes
Valence (pleasant ↔ unpleasant), arousal (shut down ↔ keyed up) and control (powerless ↔ in charge), measured separately because they vary separately. Each level is anchored to words whose ratings were measured, so as activated as rage or panic is a claim you can check where very aroused is not.
Two questions, asked at the same time
Naming the feeling is two decisions, not one. Which family is it in — anger, fear, sadness, shame? And which shade of that family exactly? Families are genuinely alternatives to one another, and once a family is settled its shades are a short list of near neighbours rather than sixty-two strangers.
Neither is asked second. All eleven shade questions go out in the same request as the family question, each one assuming its own family — if this is anger, which anger? — and the code keeps the answer whose assumption turned out to hold. The other ten are thrown away. That is worth doing because the model reads your text once and answers every question against it at the same time, so ten wasted questions cost almost nothing, while waiting to hear which one to ask costs a whole round trip. Measured over 48 readings: 398ms against 762ms when it was two requests, faster on 46 of 46 head-to-head pairs, and naming the same family every time. It was two requests, for a day.
The split was originally argued for on the grounds that one Choice over sixty-two near-synonyms would divide its own vote between wordings. Measured, it does not: one Choice scores 44 against this design's 43 on the same 46 readings, and is slightly the more certain of the two. What the split actually buys is two separate doubts. Is this sadness or affection is a different failure from it is clearly shame, but guilt or embarrassment, and the page says different things in each case; one Choice returns a single number that cannot tell them apart.
Sometimes the answer is two words
A text can be genuinely between guilt and embarrassment. When it is, the shade question does not fail — it returns 52% and 41%, and that split is the reading. Picking one of them and printing it in large type would be the failure.
So two words get named, stronger first, when both of these hold: the top word did not settle on its own (below 0.60), and the two of them hold 80% or more of the weight between them. Both conditions earn their place. Without the first, every clean reading would be paired with whatever came second at 3%. Without the second, a text spread thinly across guilt, regret and shame would be reported as two when it is really none — that one keeps a single word and says plainly that it did not settle. On the probe set the rule fires on 5 texts in 23.
Or more is load-bearing, and it took a bug to notice. Every probability this model returns is a whole hundredth — 6,796 of them checked, not one otherwise — so a top-two sum does not approach 80%, it lands on it. The flat example above does exactly that: apathy 46% plus emptiness 34%, which a rule reading more than dropped while the page showed the two numbers adding to 80. On a scale that moves in steps, a threshold has to say which side the step itself falls on.
What you are doing is a separate question again: a choice over eight speech acts, which are alternatives to one another in the way emotion words are not.
The ratings are reference, not the mechanism
Every word below carries published human ratings of valence, arousal and dominance. Using those numbers to pick the word was tried, and scored on 24 texts against a list of acceptable answers for each:
| Nearest word in the whole vocabulary, by published valence/arousal/dominance | 3/24 |
| Nearest word within a family, by rank on the axis that separates that family | 9/24 |
| Nearest word within a family, by distance in published valence/arousal/dominance | 12/24 |
| Family chosen by the model, and the shade chosen by the model within it | 22/24 |
They fail for three reasons. Dominance correlates with valence at +0.87 across these words, so the third number is nearly a copy of the first. Negative emotions occupy a very small part of the space, so the nearest one is close to arbitrary. And a word rated on its own is not the same measurement as writing read in context — people rate the word gratitude far more activated than a grateful message reads. So the ratings anchor the rubric and show where each word sits. The model does the naming.
What it cannot do
Sixty-two words and no more, and no coordinate separates feelings that differ only by what caused them. Where the shade does not separate it names the two words it is between; where even the family is unsettled, it says so.
| Word | Valence | Arousal | Dominance | n | sd |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anger — Something is wrong and someone is at fault | |||||
| annoyanceA small thing, quickly over | 2.95 | 4.10 | 3.45 | 20 | 1.23 |
| irritationGrating, repeated, wearing | 3.38 | 5.50 | 4.35 | 21 | 1.47 |
| frustrationBlocked from something they are trying to do | 2.45 | 5.94 | 3.27 | 20 | 1.39 |
| resentmentAn old grievance still carried | 3.00 | 5.19 | 4.05 | 19 | 1.89 |
| angerSquarely angry at someone or something | 2.50 | 5.93 | 5.14 | 20 | 1.36 |
| outrageAngry at something that should not be allowed | 2.97 | 6.52 | 4.80 | 39 | 1.44 |
| ragePast words; wants to break something | 2.50 | 6.62 | 4.17 | 18 | 1.95 |
| hatredSettled, lasting ill will | 2.38 | 5.22 | 4.00 | 42 | 1.78 |
| Fear — Something bad may be coming | |||||
| dreadA bad thing is coming and cannot be avoided | 3.00 | 4.50 | 3.62 | 19 | 1.89 |
| anxietyKeyed up about something that might go wrong | 2.38 | 4.78 | 3.39 | 21 | 1.66 |
| worryTurning a possible bad outcome over and over | 2.10 | 6.33 | 3.17 | 21 | 1.26 |
| fearAfraid of something specific and present | 2.93 | 6.14 | 3.32 | 42 | 1.79 |
| terrorOverwhelmed by fear | 2.75 | 6.35 | 2.95 | 20 | 1.97 |
| panicFear that has taken over action | 2.56 | 6.40 | 2.65 | 39 | 1.55 |
| Sadness — Something is lost or gone wrong and cannot be undone | |||||
| disappointmentHoped for something and did not get it | 2.79 | 4.90 | 4.08 | 19 | 1.87 |
| sadnessPlainly sad | 2.40 | 2.81 | 3.84 | 20 | 1.10 |
| lonelinessSad at being unaccompanied | 2.35 | 4.09 | 3.61 | 43 | 1.85 |
| sorrowDeep, settled sadness | 2.95 | 3.55 | 3.80 | 21 | 1.72 |
| griefSad at a loss that cannot be undone | 2.33 | 4.95 | 3.26 | 39 | 1.51 |
| miserySustained wretchedness | 2.20 | 4.82 | 3.80 | 102 | 1.59 |
| despairSad and out of hope | 3.61 | 4.64 | 4.05 | 23 | 2.08 |
| Shame — The fault is their own | |||||
| regretWishes they had done otherwise | 3.41 | 4.90 | 5.63 | 22 | 2.17 |
| guiltDid something wrong to someone | 2.29 | 4.48 | 4.35 | 21 | 1.35 |
| embarrassmentExposed in front of others, socially | 2.72 | 5.45 | 2.92 | 18 | 1.60 |
| shameSomething wrong with them, not just the act | 2.62 | 5.40 | 5.21 | 21 | 2.11 |
| humiliationDegraded by someone else | 2.27 | 5.43 | 3.26 | 22 | 1.42 |
| Aversion — Repelled by something, or resenting what someone else has | |||||
| envyWants what someone else has | 3.05 | 4.35 | 3.16 | 20 | 1.85 |
| jealousyAfraid of losing something to someone else | 2.58 | 5.45 | 3.89 | 106 | 1.37 |
| disgustRepelled by something | 3.32 | 5.00 | 4.84 | 19 | 2.40 |
| Joy — Something good has happened or is happening | |||||
| amusementFinds it funny | 7.00 | 4.82 | 6.59 | 19 | 1.56 |
| pridePleased with something they or theirs achieved | 6.50 | 5.54 | 5.83 | 18 | 2.28 |
| optimismExpects things to go well | 7.21 | 4.95 | 6.90 | 39 | 2.09 |
| excitementKeyed-up eagerness | 7.62 | 6.21 | 6.33 | 42 | 1.38 |
| delightSharp, immediate pleasure | 8.21 | 5.02 | 7.29 | 19 | 0.92 |
| joyDeep, full happiness | 8.21 | 5.55 | 7.00 | 19 | 1.18 |
| Affection — Warmth towards a particular person | |||||
| sympathyFeels for someone's difficulty | 6.57 | 3.08 | 5.90 | 21 | 2.11 |
| tendernessGentle, protective warmth | 6.89 | 3.10 | 5.08 | 18 | 1.64 |
| nostalgiaWarmth for something past | 6.65 | 4.38 | 5.36 | 20 | 2.08 |
| gratitudeThankful to someone for something done | 6.67 | 5.09 | 6.71 | 21 | 2.15 |
| compassionMoved to care by someone's suffering | 7.90 | 4.50 | 6.36 | 21 | 1.14 |
| affectionFond of someone | 7.89 | 5.64 | 6.60 | 19 | 1.05 |
| loveLoves them | 8.00 | 5.36 | 5.92 | 37 | 1.39 |
| Calm — Settled and at ease, or a weight lifted | |||||
| contentmentSatisfied with how things are | 6.62 | 4.60 | 6.58 | 21 | 2.27 |
| satisfactionPleased a thing is done or right | 7.18 | 3.18 | 6.44 | 22 | 1.87 |
| reliefA weight has just lifted | 6.63 | 4.42 | 5.64 | 19 | 1.54 |
| confidenceSure of themselves | 6.71 | 4.04 | 6.50 | 21 | 1.76 |
| peaceUntroubled | 7.75 | 4.65 | 7.17 | 40 | 1.50 |
| serenityDeeply still | 7.75 | 2.95 | 5.97 | 20 | 1.65 |
| calmNot agitated | 6.89 | 1.67 | 7.44 | 18 | 2.00 |
| Flat — No feeling has much hold | |||||
| indifferenceDoes not care either way | 4.35 | 3.61 | 5.64 | 20 | 1.73 |
| apathyCannot summon caring | 3.68 | 3.80 | 5.15 | 19 | 1.70 |
| boredomNothing here holds interest | 2.77 | 2.58 | 5.04 | 22 | 1.69 |
| emptinessFeels hollowed out | 3.26 | 3.18 | 4.10 | 23 | 2.28 |
| fatigueWorn down | 3.64 | 3.26 | 4.05 | 22 | 1.87 |
| exhaustionNothing left at all | 3.21 | 4.52 | 4.29 | 19 | 2.18 |
| Looking ahead — Turned towards something not yet here | |||||
| anticipationWaiting for something coming | 5.26 | 5.39 | 5.53 | 19 | 1.66 |
| curiosityWants to find out | 6.37 | 5.90 | 6.21 | 19 | 1.42 |
| desireWants something | 7.05 | 6.20 | 6.07 | 19 | 1.75 |
| hopeWants it and it might happen | 7.48 | 5.29 | 6.78 | 21 | 1.69 |
| determinationHas decided and will see it through | 7.58 | 5.52 | 7.06 | 19 | 1.35 |
| Startled — Caught off guard by something unexpected | |||||
| surpriseCaught off guard | 7.44 | 6.57 | 5.17 | 18 | 1.58 |
| aweStruck by something larger than them | 6.85 | 3.83 | 5.85 | 20 | 1.79 |
Ratings on a 1–9 scale, from Warriner, Kuperman & Brysbaert (2013), Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas, Behavior Research Methods 45, 1191-1207. n is how many people rated the word and sd the spread of their valence scores, which is rarely small.
The three axes, why the name is two questions asked at once, when it comes back as two words, and what the published ratings can and cannot do.