Historical language records show surge of cognitive distortion in recent decades

I wonder if there's a confounding effect here. The authors basically have a list of N-grams that they have identified as being indicative of cognitive distortions and find that these N-grams have become much more prevalent in the last few decades. But the selection of these N-grams is based on how we, today, would express these cognitive distortions. It doesn't seem that the could rule out the rate of cognitive distortions remaining the same, but the language to express them changing.

To be fair, looking at their table of N-grams, a lot of them seem pretty timeless. For example: everyone, everybody, should, ought, must, worst, best.

But many of the N-grams strike me as being rather modern formulations. For example: a loser, a toxic, OK but, OK yet.

If a team of CBT therapists constructed such a list in 1900 instead of 2020, would we see the prevalence of cognitive distortions decrease as our language changed?

I think they try to control for this by choosing a null set of random N-grams, but the random N-grams were chosen from their entire corpus --- in other words by definition it's representative of the entire time span.

Edit: As an example of this, the authors include in their sample of words indicative of cognitive distortions "everyone" and "everybody." But 200 years ago these formulations were much less popular than "all the world," which is not included in the author's sample. If you just include the modern words, it's no surprise that cognitive distortions are increasing. But if you made the list in 1800 and only included the older formulation, you would conclude that cognitive distortions are decreasing.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=everybody%2Cal...

Andrew Gelman wasn't impressed by the paper: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/07/03/historical...

"But they don’t really have any measure of entire societies or depression. The above note by Schmidt discusses why the Google books collection cannot be characterized as a measure of entire societies. There are also problems with the depression measurement. Here’s what it says in the PNAS article:

For example, the 3-gram “I am a” captures a labeling and mislabeling distortion, regardless of its context or the precise labeling involved (“lady,” “honorable person,” “loser,” etc.). These same n-grams were in earlier research shown to be significantly more prevalent in the language of individuals with depression vs. a random sample (17).

Note 17 points to this preprint, which states:

Here, we show that individuals with a self-reported diagnosis of depression on social media express higher levels of distorted thinking than a random sample.

How do they define “distorted thinking”?

[W]e define a clinical lexicon of 241 n-grams that a panel of clinical psychologists deemed to form a schema involved in the expression of a particular type of distorted thinking according to CBT theory and practice. For example, “I will never” would be implicated in the expression of a cognitive distortions such as Catastrophizing or Fortune-telling, whereas “I am a _” would be used to express a Labeling and Mislabeling distortion.

This is like a parody of clinical psychology, reminiscent of those sitcom moments when the busy suburban dad is persuaded to go to a shrink, and everything he says on the couch is interpreted as some sort of neurosis. Only this case, instead of everything being a coded statement about his mother, everything’s a coded statement about a cognitive distortion. “I am a statistician.” “There you go with those Labeling and Mislabeling distortions again!”"

My own bias as a person interested and well read in history as a science wants me to agree but there is a selection bias at work that the authors of this study do not address to my satisfaction: We are talking about PUBLISHED language. On the one hand, published and distributed works are only a fraction of the written literary works of an era and therefore only represents a commercially viable subset. On the other hand, the commercial viability is determined by the demand in the market of readers which would suggest that their language analysis could be more sound than not.

I THINK I’m reading more and more abstracts that show similarities between our current societal climate and that of the late 20s/early 30s of the last century. It will be academically interesting to see what the continuation of the current inflation and energy crisis which disproportionally hits the lower two thirds of the western populace causes in the next 2 years. The road to a substantial outburst - be it revolutions as a form of inward-directed change or god beware war - is paved at least.

Too nonsensical to even consider.

The English indicator drops from 1914 to 1960. WW1? Great depression? WW2? Nah, that doesn't depress us. Cold war, nuclear threat? Life's great! 1980, the advent of word processors, more personal, psychological literature, and a linguistic style closer to the present? Now we're depressed!

It's beyond me how you can publish findings which are based on correlations with correlations, and validations which took place 100 year later, when other explanations aren't even mentioned.

Fascinating study. It would carry more currency with me if the ngrams used were learned through ML and corpus training rather than heuristics. It is assumed these ngrams are particularly useful markers today. The significance in their absence doesn’t seem to be part of the research. When there is such dramatically “off the chart” data such as this, you need to start looking under the hood at other factors. Studying individual authors would be a good start. Other factors may also include the editorial process. Publishers tend to have common nuances they like to conform to. Could the editorial process explain why some of these nuances are widespread? It’s also worth considering that technical language (computing, for example) made great leaps around this same time period and bled into common parlance. Social media, which is cited here only as a loose correlation, also altered the brevity of writing, which changed how we use and communicate language - but it’s a far stretch to call these subtle changes distortions, at least beyond letting Jack Dorsey fuck up our use of language. The authors argue that the meaning of these ngrams hasn’t changed, but their application sure has. Overall it feels like a great area to study, and as good science does, presents more questions than it does answers. There is much more to explore here though before we can conclude the entire world is depressed. I am not an expert in linguistics, but I do feel as though there is a modern element missing from this research.

The methodology is interesting, though I'd simply call it "thematic analysis". Psycholinguistics is much more complex than trigram frequency though, as simple spam filtering proves. I suppose the schtick here is "Big Data", with a corpus that earlier researchers could never approach "by hand".

I didn't find much new here at the conceptual level. This is what "Zeitgeist" means, and many epochs have been characterised as joyous or depressive.

However the framing of the study is important for me, because I broadly agree with the hypothesis that we are in a depressive epoch. In fact we are in an interregnum, which themselves go through phases in the gap between "a world that is dead and one still waiting to be born".

Why might the psyche of the Anglosphere be battered more than other groups or nations? Sure, we've had industrial revolution, slavery, two world wars, decades of proxy wars, environmental and financial disasters... but is our lot any worse than the long suffering people of Russia, China or Africa who carry traumatic histories?

I would argue that what ails "the West" is a loss of sense of positive future. That is actually a symptom of clinical depression too. The Fukuyaman conceit of the "end of history" is actually a dark and troubling stuckness. For me the prevalence of words like "inevitable", "ubiquitous" and "inescapable", especially around technology, are markers of a profound loss of creative vision and optimism.

It has become much more socially acceptable to communicate ones emotions in the last few decades. This, added to the fact that female authors have tended to communicate differently (and I see no attempt to control for that in my admittedly quick scan of the write-up) makes me think that they may just be detecting a cultural trend in favour of honest emotional self-expression.

> Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways.

I am convinced for many reasons that social media is a major player in many mental health issues, but I wouldn't pin 100% of the blame there. For a start, the effect predates mainstream social media. But more importantly, the financial and political rewards for making people think negatively have never been higher. I think once the corporate/government/activist influencers caught onto the “make them feel bad, then offer them an alternative” trick, we were destined to see the hockey stick even if Twitter had never happened.

Sentences that apparently mark cognitive distortion: "The quality of our product is not acceptable yet.", "I won't go to this meeting, because I feel nauseous.", "Children should go to school."

I can't say I agree.

Also see this paper on the rise and fall of rationality in language (previously shared on HN)

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107848118

"whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways."

I wonder how they ensure that the standards they set for accuracy and the "right" amount of negativity don't have any bias or inaccuracy. For example, someone's language patterns may match the N-grams because they are being consistent with the language patterns they were taught or exposed to in society, but their actual thinking could be much more nuanced.

"Everything is political, if you aren't helping us then you are a part of the problem!"

Hostile advertisement messages such as this makes it really hard to stay sane. Politicians and companies seems so eager pushing people to the brink of insanity, and technology made them much more efficient at that than ever before.

> Here, we leverage the connection between depression and language to investigate whether societies as a whole, similar to individuals with depression, can undergo changes in their collective language that are associated with cognitive distortions.

...

> We caution that we make no causal claims with respect to the relationship between lexical markers, cognitive distortions, and internalizing disorders, and the above comments therefore constitute speculations that we hope may inspire follow-up research.

Hmm, sure seems like exactly what they are trying to imply is that whole societies can be diagnosed with depression by lexical analysis. Meanwhile, I'm not even sure what it means to say that a society has depression. Feels like there is indeed follow-up research to do on this, though I'd have liked if it were done first.

It's possible that a majority of people were always depressed due to the circumstances of their life, but now they all have access to ~free computers and publishing, something that has changed drastically for the first time ever in "recent decades".

Difficult to disentangle the fact that the n-grams talking about these topics have become highly profitable as an industry unto itself. Not just click bait and doom scrolling of recent years but the books, TV shows, and especially medications that talk about and claim to address the ill effects of modern life. Prozac Nation was published in 1992. Oprah was launching in 1986. People have been getting paid and made focusing on these topics in ways it’s difficult to find a historical precedent. And let’s not forget that depression as a medical condition was marketed by a Pharma company with the first SSRI cleared by the FDA in 1987.

Given working class wages have been slowly declining in real value since the late 1960s, it's understandable that the stress that causes would lead to the effects identified.

We're on the downward slope of a one time pulse in stupendously cheap and easy to reach fossil fuels. We're also running out of easy to reach groundwater resources.

If the grown ups among us don't take over and start steering things in the right direction, we're headed towards civilizational collapse.

Reality is depressing, and apparently this study confirms it showing up in our language.

I didn't read the full article but ctrl + f indicates they didn't comment on neither the editing nor publishing process

do the same analysis for online fanfiction and see if that flows the same, publishers have a heavy hand in what they want to publish a lot of the time. taking a sample from the online community should be less biased

you might even be able to visualize what different publishers are biased for if they collected that information, but alas, this is more information I don't see in the articles figures

Rather than society being more depressed etc, society is more willing to directly address depression. This is a side effect of basic material needs being solved, for a wide swath of the book writing world anyway. We're just looking for the next big jump in standard of living and all the low hanging fruit is inside us.

It looks like the steep upward curve starts about when the Internet and social media became broadly available. That could be involved, though it could also be something less obvious like changes to use of language or acceptability of bearing emotions in public.

This is a fascinating premise, both for it's core finding and - even if that is debunked or unoriginal - another demonstration of the potential revelations of large scale analysis of digitized versions of both historical records and human activity generally.

Psycho-social phenomena are slippery.

"It's not so bad, I could always kill myself" as a coping mechanism favored among depressives seems hard to predict.

Is "cognitive distortions" a standard term? I thought those were the dungeons in Persona 5.

Not readable without javascript. Does anyone have a link to a static version please?

This came off as a dry cheap shot =>

"This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample."

Neoliberalism isn't actually great for human? Who would have thought...?

Living when 'there is no such thing as society' makes you feel alone? Such surprise!

Isolating people, destroying communities, and pushing everyone to look out for themselves turns out to have negative effects? suprisepikachuface.png

(Having said all of that, there needs to be more than one study.)

The good news is that some of this is publication bias, not a devolution of public mental health. Before about 1960, the lower classes had almost no chance of getting their words into the written record. Did 7th-century serfs see themselves as oppressed and miserable, or did they love their masters? We don't know; we have no record of what they actually thought.

Therefore, we aren't necessarily in uncharted territory when it comes to lousy public mental health; it's possible that we were worse off in the 1930s and '40s and wouldn't know it by the data, because the most put-upon and miserable people weren't writing at all.

This doesn't explain the uptick since 1980. Moreover, since then, publishing (at least, traditional publishing) has reversed the changes of the midcentury and returned to being elite and exclusionary (albeit, in a different way) and yet we haven't seen this sort of censorship effect (and, to be honest, I'm glad we haven't, simply because I'm no fan of censorship). This establishes with high confidence that public mental health has worsened at least in the past 40 years (which, let's be honest, we didn't need a study to prove) and that--perhaps unusually, by historical standards--the middle and upper-middle classes are as miserable as everyone else, a fact that to me makes a strong argument for the Marxist framework in which only two social classes--the owning bourgeoisie, and the working proletariat--actually matter (since Marx did not deny a middle class's existence; he merely chose not to focus on it, believing--correctly, present conditions suggest--it to be an innately unstable status).

Misery isn't new. Oppression isn't new. War and poverty certainly aren't new. What is happening on an unprecedented scale is the re-proletarianization of people (the West's former middle class, no longer needed in such number due to the end of the Cold War) who thought themselves to be part of the bourgeoisie--who believed their educational credentials and professional networks (paper armor, it turns out) were "as good as" actually having capital. Wrong, it turns out. Such people can be making $200k/year one day and forced to do Scrum the next; and we're all one medical emergency away from ruin. The collapse of a middle class isn't nearly as bad a calamity as what nature and history have thrown at the poor, but it is the kind of disaster one hears about.