We then show that the structure of people's beliefs about intra-state dynamics reflect how people make other mental state judgments (namely, their conceptual similarity and transition probability) and how different mental state words are used in written text across a variety of cultures.

These temporal motifs clearly map on to interpretable psychological dimensions: high/low arousal, duration/ending abruptness, and perceptibility/traitlikeness. We discuss the relationship between the shape of each component's loading and its psychological correlates.

Using PCA, we found that three temporal motifs explained a large majority of the variance in people's drawn intensity profiles, with overall intensity, slope, and variability emerging as the three dimensions of people's beliefs about intra-state dynamics.

Using data collected in a curve-drawing task, we measured people's beliefs about these dynamics for individual mental states–these are called mental state intensity profiles. This low-d UMAP embedding shows the variability in average curves for different mental states.

Excited to share the preprint for my 1st 1st-author manuscript! @markthornton.bsky.social and I show that people hold robust, structured beliefs about how individual mental states unfold in intensity over time. We find that these beliefs are reflected in other domains of mental state understanding.