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People with Depression Use Language Differently

posted by mrpg on Wednesday January 02 2019, @06:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the take-a-sad-song-and-make-it-better dept.

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] Traditionally, linguistic analyses in this field have been carried out by researchers reading and taking notes. Nowadays, computerised text analysis methods allow the processing of extremely large data banks in minutes. This can help spot linguistic features which humans may miss, calculating the percentage prevalence of words and classes of words, lexical diversity, average sentence length, grammatical patterns and many other metrics.

[...] More interesting is the use of pronouns. Those with symptoms of depression use significantly more first person singular pronouns – such as “me”, “myself” and “I” – and significantly fewer second and third person pronouns – such as “they”, “them” or “she”. This pattern of pronoun use suggests people with depression are more focused on themselves, and less connected with others. Researchers have reported that pronouns are actually more reliable in identifying depression than negative emotion words.

[...] The style of language relates to how we express ourselves, rather than the content we express. Our lab recently conducted a big data text analysis of 64 different online mental health forums, examining over 6,400 members. “Absolutist words” – which convey absolute magnitudes or probabilities, such as “always”, “nothing” or “completely” – were found to be better markers for mental health forums than either pronouns or negative emotion words.

-- submitted from IRC

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  • (Score: 2) by TheFool on Wednesday January 02 2019, @03:34PM (4 children)

    by TheFool (7105) on Wednesday January 02 2019, @03:34PM (#781045)

    I wonder what you'd come up with if you data mined this site.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:54PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:54PM (#781078)

    A depressed AI, probably.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday January 02 2019, @05:00PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday January 02 2019, @05:00PM (#781082) Journal

    Your post contained twice as many "you" than "I", so I guess you should be safe. :-)

    And as prophylaxis against depression I'll add:

    You, your, they, them, he, she, thou!

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @03:58PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @03:58PM (#781515)

      Whew! That was close!