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Updated: Jan 13, 2026

Reducing State Anxiety Using Working Memory Maintenance
Published on: July 19, 2017
USING PSYCHOLINGUISTICS IN DEVELOPING THERAPEUTIC METHODS FOR OVERCOMING ANXIETY STATES
M Zhylin1, O Starynska2, V Yatsynovych3
11Department of Practical Psychology, Odesa National Maritime University, Ukraine.
Purpose:
The study aimed to identify the relationship between speech characteristics and anxiety levels to identify psycholinguistic markers that can serve as diagnostic tools in psychotherapy practice.
Methods:
A sample of 160 participants was stratified by anxiety level (high, medium, low) using standardized methods (STAI, BAI). Quantitative analysis showed significant differences in the speech of the groups: participants with high anxiety used shorter sentences, were characterized by a lower level of lexical diversity, more frequent use of negatively colored vocabulary and the pronoun "I", and also used future tense forms less often.
Results:
Correlation and regression analyses confirmed the close relationship of these speech indicators with anxiety levels, which explained up to 48% of the variation on the BAI scale. The results suggest that speech analysis can be a reliable indicator of anxiety levels and can be integrated into psychotherapy practice as an additional diagnostic tool. The resulting speech profile of a highly anxious individual-negative vocabulary, self-referentiality, cognitive simplification, and low future orientation-can be used to individualize psychotherapeutic interventions and monitor therapy dynamics.
Conclusions:
Practical applications include regular speech analysis, working with written texts, and integrating automated analysis systems into clinical and online environments. A promising direction is to expand the sample and test the cross-cultural validity of the resulting model.
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