The Emotion Word Fluency Test (EWFT): Initial psychometric, validation, and physiological evidence in young adults

INTRODUCTION: The clinical assessment of affective functioning has been slow to incorporate findings from affective neuroscience. Of particular interest in the current study is the assessment of affective word production. METHOD: In a series of four studies, we examined test-retest and interrater reliability for the Emotion Word Fluency Test (EWFT), basic construct validity with existing verbal fluency measures, physiological responses across verbal fluency tasks, and a novel scoring method to examine qualitative aspects of participant response sets. RESULTS: Results demonstrated interrater and test-retest reliability values that were comparable to those of other commonly used verbal fluency tests. Construct validity was demonstrated by relations between the EWFT and other verbal fluency tests as well as through physiological evidence that performance on the EWFT is related to greater sympathetic activity than traditional verbal fluency tasks. Lastly, some of the novel scoring metrics related to two self-report measures of emotional functioning. CONCLUSIONS: Taken together, our findings provide initial support for the use of the EWFT as a measure of emotion word generation ability in young adults. This measure may prove to be useful in the assessment of affective language production in patient populations.