Elevated Use of Absolutist Words Is a Marker of Anxiety, Depression [pdf]

I have always though a complete analysis of the entire list of absolutist words would be beneficial to everyone.

People are constantly using these words without totally understanding how they sound to others. This paper is full of interesting statistics that all people must be made aware of. Now that there is a link to suicide and depression nothing could be more important than sharing this with your whole network, every person.

I absolutely recommend reading the paper in full. It will definitely change everything about the way you speak. I’ll completely change the way I speak and never ever use these words again.

Well, except “constant” which I have to use to refer to software constants.

Hi, OP here.

The actual title of the linked article is "In an Absolute State: Elevated Use of Absolutist Words Is a Marker Specific to Anxiety, Depression, and Suicidal Ideation".

Unfortunately this is well over the 80 character limit for HN titles.

The journal page at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2167702617747074 has the abstract if you don't want to download a PDF.

Edited for minor wording changes

Funny thing is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) tackles black and white ways of thinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy

Another article was posted on Hacker News talking about Woebot. It's easy enough to see a pattern in Woebot's discourse and it can help people get out of really tough spots.

If you're curious which absolutist words they picked: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/21677026177470...

Methodology for determining words:

"To construct these dictionaries, we initially brainstormed more than 300 absolutist words and 200 nonabsolutist words (including extreme words). Testing on pilot data (control and test groups) revealed that many of the words on these original lists were too obscure to register with sufficient frequency for analysis. Consequently, the original dictionaries were reduced to the most prevalent 22 absolutist words and 43 nonabsolutist words (including 21 extreme words). Although this was based on a mostly arbitrary cutoff, it was intended that the lists be large enough to produce representative dictionary percentages, but small enough to facilitate independent validation by experts. The 22 absolutist words and 43 nonabsolutist words were combined into a single list of 65 words. Five independent expert judges were asked to categorize them as absolute, nonabsolute, and/or extreme. Two of the judges are clinical psychologists from the University of Reading Charlie Waller Institute and three are linguists from the University of Reading School of Clinical Language Sciences. Judges were permitted to place words into more than one category (i.e., extreme and absolute). The agreement between our original categorization of the words (absolutist/nonabsolutist) and that of the judges ranged between 83% and 94%, whereas the interjudge agreement was 96%. Words were considered absolute, extreme, or nonabsolute on the basis of a majority decision by the judges. Three words, anything, need, and needed, were moved from the absolutist dictionary to the nonabsolutist dictionary as they were not categorized as absolute by the majority of judges. All the words on our nonabsolutist dictionary were judged nonabsolute. Judges showed almost no agreement on extreme words, this category was consequently removed from the analysis (collapsed into the nonabsolutist category)."

One thing I am sorta, kind of, sometimes realising is that like - if you preface what you want to say, maybe with a lot of what are potentially unsure phrases, that people - in my opinion, I'm not an expert - won't take you, in certain situations, as seriously.

Brash people who lay things out in absolutes are listened to and respected more. I always suffered under the delusion that people who talked like that must really know what they're talking about and done their research - why else would they speak with such confidence? It took me a long time to realise they don't know anymore than I do, and sometimes less. I can now spot a lot of well-respected people in tech - who are admired widely and quoted endlessly - who are stunningly ignorant of some of the things they talk about.

It's also made me realise that appearance and accent matter a huge amount in tech. If a bald Indian man invented a derivative language and coined a bunch of catch-phrases and neologisms about complexity - he'd be met with memes and derision. But if an American man with thick luscious hair and an educated coastal accent does it, everyone takes him seriously.

Definitely. "Never say never. Always give it your all. It's all or nothing." Everyone constantly says these things all of the time, but it's totally untenable. Besides being harmful, it's completely cliche. It's time everyone comes to terms with it. It's the subtle things that kill ya. Everything must be reexamined and reworked -- a complete and full examination of our entire vocabulary -- every jot and tittle. A massive undertaking yes, but we must. Let's face it, we need whole-scale change. Change is the only constant, and it's now or never. We must all pledge to absolutely never ever say these things again. Ever.

I think that absolutist thinking has something to do with social signalling and interpretation thereof.

Someone who thinks in an absolutist manner might be more likely to jump to conclusions based on vague evidence instead of collecting more observations before passing judgement. Today with social media, instant communication and expectation to be answered immediately the absence of a like from a friend has the potential to be devastating.

It's as if the observer is doing bayesian inference where his prior is: "everything is either good or evil". With that prior they can never assign probability mass to hypotheses/explanations which lie somewhere in-between. Furthermore, by reacting to their interpretation I suspect that they are more likely to create the circumstances that lead them later to confirm that they where right which then might further sharpen their prior (if it wasn't already extreme in one way or another).

I agree. The bigger question is which came first:

1. Absolutism led to anxiety/depression and was signaled in speech.

2. Anxiety/Depression led people to think absolutely giving rise to absolutist speech.

3. Absolutist speech created anxiety/depression circumstances.

I go with number 1.

This is helpful. When I hear "always", "never", "all", etc. I tend to tune out or take the remainder of the conversation less seriously as I attribute the absolute language to an issue the speaker hasn't quite fully processed or understood yet.

Of course there are exceptions when absolute words are appropriate but they feel like red flags to me.

A good friend of mine killed himself about 15 years ago. The day before, he used absolutist words like I had never heard him use. So, this idea resonates with me.

The flip side to this is that it seems to me many leaders of note abuse these words constantly. I would love to see the study of absolutist words relationship to the ability of leaders to gain followers. Most leaders such as Churchill spoke with heavy use of absolutist words.

Interesting to contrast this with certain religious and political leaders who see "equivalencey" as a character weakness and that good and just people will not be conflicted and you can draw a sharp line between the good and evil people in the world.

I can't agree with this. I don't think scraping specific forums for a small dictionary list of words can be an accurate marker of depression, especially when those forums overlap with your control ones; asthma, cancer, and ptsd sufferers would also suffer depression and anxiety as well, and it's hard to say those would be linked to word usage. It feels more like they had an idea and constructed an experiment to bolster it, considering they have no way to verify what the actual rates of depression and anxiety are apart from posting in that forum, nor any way to take into account lurkers and non-posting participants, who make the majority of a forum's inhabitants.

I would have written the headline as "In an Absolute State: Elevated Use of Absolutist Words Could Be a Marker Specific to Anxiety, Depression, and Suicidal Ideation" but maybe that's only because I'm in a good mood.

Comfort and hope often live in doubts, like doubting that cancer will ultimately kill you, doubting that skipping that safety check will hurt anyone, doubting that your wife will actually leave if she catches you doing what she told you not to do, or doubting that you'll get caught during this burglary.

Lacking these doubts may leave one with anxiety and depression, but says nothing about whether these doubts are sound or unsound.

I've been there! Having been there, I've wondered whether this hypothesis is true. Nice to see people attempting to quantify this.

Only a sith deals in absolutes.

As a non-native speaker, what are absolutist words?

They're arguing that a jump from 1% to 2% of total speech is enough to tell if someone is anxious or depressed: https://imgur.com/a/Eu5sR

While that might be statistically significant, it's practically useless. How on earth can anyone even perceive this day to day?

Also, there's a lot of potential for the results to be drowned out by bias in the study design and other confounding factors.

I really don't think the evidence supports the hypothesis in any meaningful way.

I wonder what the avoidance of absolutist words indicates.

Another possible illustration of this correlation is the overwhelming displacement of nuance in public discourse over the last decade (eg: absolutist clickbait headlines targeting niche internet audiences), and the growing atmosphere of desperation. It's difficult to pick a definite causal direction, as it seems that each one amplifies the other in turn--a vicious cycle.

I wonder if belief in authoritarian ideologies and authoritarian tendencies are markers of anxiety, depression, and mental illness?

Hehe. I find using 'absolutist' words to be some of the greatest simple joys of life! Hyperbole and absurdism are high art, high comedy, and the best way to explore cultural conceptual spaces. It works for science and other approaches as well, as most novelty is usually found at the fringes and where assumptions break down.

The Buddha patiently answered most people's questions, but there were some he refused to answer at all, saying that they should be put aside.

Many of these were questions about absolutes:

Is the world eternal?

Is the world finite?

Is the self identical with the body?

Does the Buddha exist after death?

In fact in the buddhist path one goal is to see how everything† is impermanent and dependent on conditions for its existence.

†Everything but nirvana.

Very interesting. I wish there was more background on absolutist thinking and mental health. Specifically, is the relationship between absolutist thinking and, say, depression, Whorfian, in the sense that the language used day-to-day impacts their mental health? Or is it symptomatic? My gut says a combination of both.

I wonder what it says about me that I when I read "Absolutist" my brain replaced it with "Absurdist" and I got excited and depressed. I even got to the point where I was wondering what some examples of absurdist words were. And then I read it again with a higher font size.

Interesting. So far my initial reaction to overuse of absolutist words has been to regard the person as relatively incapable of accurate depiction of reality, as absolutist descriptions are usually simply dead wrong. I might start taking a more empathetic approach I think.

This says a lot about the sort of clickbait headlines that are all over Facebook and Twitter:

"This photo of a puppy eating ice cream IS EVERYTHING"

such and such RESTORED/DESTROYED MY FAITH IN HUMANITY

blah blah blah IS EVERYTHING YOU'VE EVER WANTED

It's honestly exhausting just to read it.

I can't find the dictionaries they used. It's hard to develop any intuition about the utility of research like this, without the actual dictionaries they applied analysis to.

Are the word lists public information? Why or why not?

Are there links to the word lists?

This is confirmed by research in the book Learned Optimism (great read for depression).

The way HN is wholeheartedly glomming onto this is just nauseating. Please don't tell me we're going to start a whole new wave of language-shaming because someone someone linked to an implicit newspeak advocacy PDF once.

Interesting. So what does that mean for logicians and mathematicians?

bad news for 90% of internet population

But then how would mass media for-profit corporations help to divide and conquer?

Are you absolutely sure about this?

Well I never.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOhZ5wD6u7A