It’s All About Me: Self-Focused Attention and Depressed Mood

Sloan, Denise M.

doi:10.1007/s10608-005-0511-1

Cited by 31 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 32 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Compared with other people, depressed people are known to focus more on internal signals than on external circumstances (Sloan, 2005). Therefore we expected the children in our study to pay more attention to their bodily signals than to the emotional impact of the situation, and to display a coping focus in line with this attention bias.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Emotions and self‐esteem as indicators of somatic complaints in children

Terwogt

Rieffe

Miers

et al. 2006

Infant and Child Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The literature on somatic complaints in children without a clear physical medical cause often demonstrates connections with various psychological factors, such as negative emotions and problems handling them, poor self-image, and coping potential. We entered these elements into a structural model to elucidate the relationships among them and tested it on 330 children (mean age 10 years and 9 months). The results showed that mood balance contributed most to the prediction of self-reported somatic complaints. Moreover, mood (in combination with anxiety and depression problems) had an indirect impact on children's somatic complaints by influencing self-esteem. The influence and position of coping was less clear. The results are discussed in terms of the 'symptom perception theory'.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…A tendency for depression, on the other hand, may very well elicit an enhanced physiological coping focus. Depressed people are known to focus more on their internal signals than on the outside world (Sloan, 2005). Consequently, they will be more likely to explicitly notice their bodily signals more often than others.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotions and self‐esteem as indicators of somatic complaints in children

Terwogt

Rieffe

Miers

et al. 2006

Infant and Child Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, those who write about resolved events use more past tense words (Pasuputhi, 2007); more past tense and fewer present tense words are linked with decreased grief and trauma (Boals & Klein, 2005;Pillemer, Desrochers & Ebanks, 1998). First-person singular pronouns (e.g., I, me) are related to depression (e.g., Gortner & Pennebaker, 2004;Sloan, 2005). More positive than negative emotion words as well as more meaning-making words (cause and insight) indicate recovery from emotional trauma (i.e., they have cognitively processed the event and are moving toward feeling more positive than negative) and are linked to health and well-being (e.g., Pennebaker, Mehl, & Niederhoffer 2003).…”

Section: Linguistic Markersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday Confrontation of Discrimination: The Well-Being Costs and Benefits to Women over Time

Foster¹

2013

IJPS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Taking action against discrimination has positive consequences for well-being (e.g., Cocking & Drury, 2004) but most of this research has focused on collective actions and has used methodologies assessing one point in time. This study therefore used a diary methodology to examine how women's everyday confrontations of discrimination would affect measures of subjective and psychological well-being, and how these relationships would change over time. In a 28-day online diary study, women indicated their daily experience of discrimination, described their response, and completed measures of well-being. Results showed that at the beginning of the study, using indirect confrontation predicted greater well-being than using angered confrontation. However, continued use of indirect and educational confrontation decreased well-being whereas continued use of angered confrontation increased well-being over time. By the end of the study, using angered confrontation predicted greater well-being than using indirect confrontation. Analyses of linguistic markers were consistent with the explicit measures of well-being. Implications for distinguishing between types of confrontations and integrating time analyses are discussed.

show abstract

“…Previous work has shown that language positivity is aligned with the mood of the author, i.e., happier people use more positive language (20,21,38,39). Although these findings were based on the writings of individual subjects, we hypothesize that the same pattern should be observable in group-level time series.…”

Section: Short-term Fluctuations In Lpbmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Others have argued that the evaluative content of language might express people's current affective state (19)(20)(21). Because humans tend to show an affective bias toward positivity (22-24)-a phenomenon often referred to as the "positivity offset" (25)-it is plausible to see LPB as a reflection of a lower-level bias toward subjective positive affect (12,26,27).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic positivity in historical texts reflects dynamic environmental and psychological factors

Iliev

Hoover

Dehghani

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

People use more positive words than negative words. Referred to as "linguistic positivity bias" (LPB), this effect has been found across cultures and languages, prompting the conclusion that it is a panhuman tendency. However, although multiple competing explanations of LPB have been proposed, there is still no consensus on what mechanism(s) generate LPB or even on whether it is driven primarily by universal cognitive features or by environmental factors. In this work we propose that LPB has remained unresolved because previous research has neglected an essential dimension of language: time. In four studies conducted with two independent, time-stamped text corpora (Google books Ngrams and the New York Times), we found that LPB in American English has decreased during the last two centuries. We also observed dynamic fluctuations in LPB that were predicted by changes in objective environment, i.e., war and economic hardships, and by changes in national subjective happiness. In addition to providing evidence that LPB is a dynamic phenomenon, these results suggest that cognitive mechanisms alone cannot account for the observed dynamic fluctuations in LPB. At the least, LPB likely arises from multiple interacting mechanisms involving subjective, objective, and societal factors. In addition to having theoretical significance, our results demonstrate the value of newly available data sources in addressing long-standing scientific questions.Pollyanna hypothesis | positivity in language | automated text analysis | subjective happiness F or a naive observer, human language use often appears to be a function of utility and context. We craft our enunciations according to our intentions and, aside from correlations between language and environmental and experiential cues, we seem to be masters of our words. However, as social scientists have long recognized, linguistic patterns are also a function of social, cultural, and cognitive factors (1-5).One of the more striking examples of such linkages comes from research on the affective content of language revealing that people use positive words more frequently than negative words, an effect first reported by Zajonc in 1968 (6) and subsequently replicated many times (7-11). This phenomenon, initially referred to as the "Pollyanna hypothesis" (7) and more recently as "linguistic positivity bias" (LPB) (9), has been demonstrated across numerous languages and corpora (7,11,12), leading to the conclusion that it is a panhuman tendency.However, although the existence of LPB is well-established, there is surprisingly little consensus on what mechanisms are responsible for the effect. Among the mechanisms proposed are universal cognitive biases (6, 7), affective states (12), objective circumstances (8), and societal norms (9, 10, 12). However, research has been unable to establish which of these mechanisms drives LPB and whether the effect might be driven by interaction between a subset of these or other factors. One reason for this uncertainty is that previous investigations of LPB ha...

show abstract

It’s All About Me: Self-Focused Attention and Depressed Mood

Cited by 31 publications

References 32 publications

Emotions and self‐esteem as indicators of somatic complaints in children

Emotions and self‐esteem as indicators of somatic complaints in children

Everyday Confrontation of Discrimination: The Well-Being Costs and Benefits to Women over Time

Linguistic positivity in historical texts reflects dynamic environmental and psychological factors

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About