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First-person Pronoun Use in Spoken Language as a Predictor of Future Depressive Symptoms: Preliminary Evidence from a Clinical Sample of Depressed Patients.
Journal article

First-person Pronoun Use in Spoken Language as a Predictor of Future Depressive Symptoms: Preliminary Evidence from a Clinical Sample of Depressed Patients.

  • Zimmermann J Psychologische Hochschule Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
  • Brockmeyer T Department of General Internal Medicine and Psychosomatics, University Hospital Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany.
  • Hunn M Department of Psychology, University of Koblenz-Landau, Landau, Germany.
  • Schauenburg H Department of General Internal Medicine and Psychosomatics, University Hospital Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany.
  • Wolf M Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • 2016-01-29
Published in:
  • Clinical psychology & psychotherapy. - 2017
Depression
Linguistic Style
Pronoun Use
Rumination
Self-focus
Self-focused Attention
Adult
Depressive Disorder
Female
Humans
Inpatients
Language
Longitudinal Studies
Male
Middle Aged
Prospective Studies
Young Adult
English Several theories suggest that self-focused attention plays an important role in the maintenance of depression. However, previous studies have predominantly relied on self-report and laboratory-based measures such as sentence completion tasks to assess individual differences in self-focus. We present a prospective, longitudinal study based on a sample of 29 inpatients with clinical depression, investigating whether an implicit, behavioural measure of self-focused attention, i.e., the relative frequency of first-person singular pronouns in naturally spoken language, predicts depressive symptoms at follow-up over and above initial depression. We did not find a significant cross-sectional association between depressive symptoms and first-person singular pronoun use. However, first-person singular pronoun use significantly predicted depressive symptoms approximately 8 months later, even after controlling for depressive symptoms at baseline or discharge. Exploratory analyses revealed that this effect was mainly driven by the use of objective and possessive self-references such as 'me' or 'my'. Our findings are in line with theories that highlight individual differences in self-focused attention as a predictor of the course of depression. Moreover, our findings extend previous work in this field by adopting an unobtrusive approach of non-reactive assessment, capturing naturally occurring differences in self-focused attention. We discuss possible clinical applications of language-based assessments and interventions with regard to self-focus. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


KEY PRACTITIONER MESSAGE
Naturally occurring individual differences in first-person singular pronoun use provide an unobtrusive way to assess patients' automatic self-focused attention. Frequent use of first-person singular pronouns predicts an unfavourable course of depression. Self-focused language might offer innovative ways of tracking and targeting therapeutic change.
Language
  • English
Open access status
closed
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/226505
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