Year: 2019
Type: review
Study designs: Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis
Abstract: Recent research on depression suggests that speech can reveal underlying processes in the mind of the depressed. This paper systematically reviews the literature on linguistic features in depression. A corpus of 26 papers investigating the relation between depression and one of the three linguistic features, first-person singular pronouns, positive emotion words, or negative emotion words, were analysed. Three meta-analyses were performed on the three linguistic features. The meta-analyses identify differences in first-person singular pronoun use, negative emotion word use, and positive emotion word use between depressed individuals and healthy controls (Cohen’s d of 0.44, 0.72 and -0.38). Furthermore, the meta-analyses identify correlations for severity of depression and first-person singular pronoun use, negative emotion word use, and positive emotion word use (Pearson’s r of 0.19, 0.12 and -0.21). All three linguistic features produced small to medium effect sizes thus suggesting a relation between the use of the linguistic features and depression. The effect was not moderated by age or type of task the respondents completed.
Author: Katrine Bønneland Tølbøll
Institution: Aarhus University
Language: English
Topic: Mental Health via Writing
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3042632851