ANEST Narrative-Affect Representations (ANAD v1): Derived Feature Resource for Studying Narrative-Affect Discrepancy

ANEST Narrative-Affect Representations (ANAD v1) is a large-scale, privacy-preserving derived-feature research resource for studying the relation between narrative structure and expressed affect in naturalistic relationship narratives. The canonical resource comprises 351,734 English-language observations derived from posts in Reddit's r/relationships community collected over 2012-2023 through Pushshift and the official Reddit API. Public releases contain derived numerical representations and aggregate outputs rather than raw narrative text, usernames, direct URLs, or personal metadata. Each observation is represented through a transparent measurement layer that includes basic document descriptors, Level of Complexity (LoC), normalized VADER-derived affective polarity, dataset-level narrative-affect discrepancy measures (NADI and NADI_signed), and supplementary affective summaries for analyses requiring cancellation-robust measures of affective magnitude. In the canonical ANAD representation, dataset-level discrepancy is defined on the common 0-10 feature space: NADI = |LoC - sentiment_norm| NADI_signed = LoC - sentiment_norm These dataset-level discrepancy measures are distinct from the residual-based, GAM-normalised NADI used in the 2026 Acta Psychologica article. The two operationalisations address related questions but are not interchangeable. Version 1.4.0 Version 1.4.0 is a public-record alignment release. It standardizes LoC as Level of Complexity, aligns the public documentation with the published Data in Brief article, restores safe aggregate statistical and documentation artifacts, clarifies the distinction between dataset-level discrepancy and the residual-based Acta Psychologica measure, and links the principal published studies derived from the ANAD research resource. No canonical feature values are changed by this release. No raw or quasi-raw narrative text is newly released. The included anad_v1.4_reference_annotation.ipynb is a public reference implementation aligned with the dataset-level annotation specification reported in the Data in Brief article; it is not presented as the historical execution artifact of downstream analyses. Privacy and provenance The historical v1.0 archive remains restricted because it contains files with a greater potential for reconstruction of narrative content. Version 1.4.0 preserves the public-release principle established for ANAD: derived features and aggregate outputs are publicly available, while raw or quasi-raw narrative content is not redistributed. ANAD v1 should therefore be treated as a derived-feature research resource rather than a raw text corpus. Its variables are text-derived proxies and should not be interpreted as direct measures of subjective emotional state, diagnosis, regulatory intent, or psychopathology. Related publications Kim, R. S. B. (2026). ANEST narrative-affect dataset (ANAD v1): A large-scale derived feature resource for quantifying narrative-affective discrepancy. Data in Brief, 66, 112643. DOI: 10.1016/j.dib.2026.112643 Kim, R. S. B. (2026). Narrative-affect discrepancy as a regulated degree of freedom in 351,734 relationship narratives. PLOS ONE, 21(5), e0348715. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0348715 Kim, R. S. B. (2026). Narrative complexity is weakly coupled with affective energy, not net valence, in relationship narratives. Acta Psychologica, 270, 107689. DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2026.107689 ANAD v1 is part of the broader ANEST research program at the Ryan Research Institute (RRI), Paris.