A conservative lexical analysis of explicitly named affective and evaluative states in Czech forensic-archive suicide...

Forensic suicide notes offer a window into what people feel near death. Using a conservative lexical approach, we mapped named emotion words and emotion-related states in Czech suicide notes and examined variation by sex and age. Notes were transcribed and anonymized. Only verbatim Czech terms were coded, and each term was counted once within a case-level suicide communication. The analytic subset comprised 101 cases with at least one explicitly named affective or evaluative term, 76 men and 25 women, with 180 term-by-case occurrences and a mean of 1.78 coded terms per case. Love was most frequent, 59/101, 58.4%, indicating a relational core in this final communication. Low-frequency negative terms showed the clearest sex patterning, including threat-related and moral self-evaluative labels mainly in men. In the oldest group, love declined, while somatic and distress terms clustered selectively. The approach captures explicit affective vocabulary, not the full affective content of the notes.