This and that in depression: Cross-linguistic semantic effects

Demonstratives (in English "this" and "that") are pivotal to human communication, facilitating joint attention and the establishment of a common ground of reference. All languages have at least two forms, typically distinguishing proximal from distal space, where "space" is defined by a range of context-dependent physical, psychological, social and referent-intrinsic factors. Recent work based on the Demonstrative Choice Task (DCT) has indicated, that in the absence of a guiding context, demonstrative reference may capture an experienced or emotional proximity to the referent concepts, and that semantic differences in responses allow implicit inferences on individual differences in psychological space related to depression. The present paper investigated the extent to which these patterns generalize across languages, including German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Chinese and Tagalog Filipino samples. DCT-based classification models robustly outperformed baseline models in all languages except for Chinese, and showed similar semantic patterns as observed for English. Particularly negative emotion dimensions were consistently among the most important features across models, for which choice of the proximal demonstrative form was more frequent in the depression group than the control group. The opposite pattern was observed for positive emotion features, however, these effects were more variable across languages. Results suggest that simple lexical choices in the DCT capture semantic differences in experiential states related to depression, and may be used to map individuals along a multidimensional semantic space, potentially providing novel insights into individual differences in disorder states and etiology.