(PS3-B31) Linguistic Analysis of Adolescent Narratives of Stressful Life Events: Associations Between First-person Pronoun Usage, Depression, and Emotion Dysregulation

First-person pronoun usage (“I”, “My”, “Mine”) has been identified as a linguistic marker related to depressive symptomatology (Edwards & Holtzman, 2017). Theory suggests that increased first-person pronoun usage, operationalized as the proportion of first-person pronouns in a given text, may indicate greater self-focused attention, linked to poorer emotion regulation (Nook et al., 2020). Brooding has also been associated with first-person pronoun usage (Brockmeyer et al., 2015). This growing literature has implications for theory, early identification, and treatment development. However, the current research base is limited in several ways, including overreliance on self-reported outcome measures, exclusive focus on adult populations, and use of relatively small samples.

The current study explores the feasibility of conducting linguistic analyses on audio recorded interviews from an existing dataset of adolescents. The UCLA Life Stress Interview (LSI; Hammen et al., 2000) is a widely used, gold-standard semi-structured assessment of chronic and episodic stress that elicits descriptions of stressful life experiences in a variety of domains. Our goals are twofold: a) extend prior findings by examining associations between first-person pronoun usage and depression, brooding, emotion dysregulation, and stress in adolescents, in a series of preregistered hypotheses (https://osf.io/g6wc8); b) to generally assess feasibility of leveraging the LSI for linguistic data analysis.

Adolescents (n = 231) participated as part of larger study, completing interviews (LSIs, KSADS diagnostic interviews; Kaufman et al., 1997, coded dimensionally) and self-report questionnaires (e.g., brooding, emotion regulation, depressive symptoms; Nolen-hoeksema et al., 1999; (Gratz & Roemer, 2003; Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995). Audiotaped LSIs were auto-transcribed by NVIVO software, after which the participant speech was isolated and hand-checked for accuracy. First-person pronoun usage was derived from transcripts using LIWC software (Pennebaker et al., 2015).

Preliminary analyses were conducted in a subsample (n = 55) while transcription is underway (full data available in coming months). Despite limited power in available subsample, results indicate that first-person pronoun usage is positively associated with self-reported depressive symptoms (r = .33) and emotion dysregulation (r = .28), ps< .05, with KSADS depression ratings (r = .25, p = .071) and brooding (r = .25, p = .070) trending towards a positive association. Full data (n = 231) will permit additional tests for robustness (see preregistration).

Consistent with the adult literature, we found a positive relationship between first-person pronoun usage, self-reported depression, and emotion dysregulation in our adolescent sample. Preliminary results provide support for transcripts of LSIs being viable sources from which to harvest linguistic variables. Understanding the relationship between linguistic variables and mental health measures in adolescents is particularly important as it is a critical developmental period for emotion regulation and the first onsets of depression.