Depression, negative emotionality, and self-referential language: A multi-lab, multi-measure, and multi-language-task research synthesis

• Autores: Allison M. Tackman, David A. Sbarra, Angela L. Carey, M. Brent Donnellan, Andrea Horn, Nicholas S. Holtzman, To'Meisha S. Edwards, James W. Pennebaker, Matthias R. Mehl
• Localización: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, ISSN 0022-3514, ISSN-e 1939-1315, Vol. 116, Nº. 5, 2019, págs. 817-834
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 1 Cita
• Resumen

  • Depressive symptomatology is manifested in greater first-person singular pronoun use (i.e., I-talk), but when and for whom this effect is most apparent, and the extent to which it is specific to depression or part of a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk, remains unclear. Using pooled data from N = 4,754 participants from 6 labs across 2 countries, we examined, in a preregistered analysis, how the depression–I-talk effect varied by (a) first-person singular pronoun type (i.e., subjective, objective, and possessive), (b) the communication context in which language was generated (i.e., personal, momentary thought, identity-related, and impersonal), and (c) gender. Overall, there was a small but reliable positive correlation between depression and I-talk (r = .10, 95% CI [.07, .13]). The effect was present for all first-person singular pronouns except the possessive type, in all communication contexts except the impersonal one, and for both females and males with little evidence of gender differences. Importantly, a similar pattern of results emerged for negative emotionality. Further, the depression–I-talk effect was substantially reduced when controlled for negative emotionality but this was not the case when the negative emotionality–I-talk effect was controlled for depression. These results suggest that the robust empirical link between depression and I-talk largely reflects a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk. Self-referential language using first-person singular pronouns may therefore be better construed as a linguistic marker of general distress proneness or negative emotionality rather than as a specific marker of depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)