Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades

Abstract

Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.

Reply to Schmidt et al.: A robust surge of cognitive distortions in historical language

“… 1 , figure 1 ) perform a linear regression analysis that shows a correlation between a word’s relative frequency in fiction and its rise in prevalence. Because our CDS n-grams ( 2 , 3 ) are about 43% more prevalent in fiction than English overall, a shift toward more fiction does increase CDS n-gram prevalence. However, our analyses indicate that the observed rise of fiction in the data would only cause CDS prevalence to increase 16% from 1980 to 2019, much less than the magnitude of the observed shift and accounted for by our null model.…”

“…In their critique, Schmidt et al. ( 1 ) claim that our analysis of book language ( 2 ) cannot meaningfully reflect society. Their arguments bear no relevance to our paper.…”

“…We have to disagree. We made our observations relative to a null model that specifically controls for such changes in corpus composition and other recency effects, and reported a robust signal well above that baseline ( 2 ).…”

“… ( Left ) Original results published in Bollen et al. ( 2 ). ( Right ) The same analysis with n-gram counts in the Fiction corpus subtracted from the English corpus.…”

Prevalence and Temporal Trends Analysis of Screening and Diagnostic Instruments in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Text Mining Study

“…Extracting potentially useful information using keyword matching or advanced methods and investigating the prevalence trends of specific topics can help to gain better insight into a particular field and discover inconspicuous changes. Analysis of prevalence trends is a widespread practice of collecting information and attempting to spot trends in the information, such as cultural trends [ 9 ], cognitive distortion prevalence [ 10 ], research topic trends [ 11 ], and top popular questionnaires [ 12 ]. These studies have shed light on large-scale text data analyses for examining prevalence and trends.…”