Depressive Symptoms Are Associated with Linguistic Features of Negative but Not Positive Autobiographical Narratives

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with variation across several linguistic features, including more negative tone, less positive tone, greater use of first-person pronouns, and reduced use of affiliation words. This research has largely relied on analyzing texts from clinical samples, autobiographical reports of negatively valenced content, or unprompted narratives. This represents a significant gap in the literature, as large-scale language datasets (e.g., social media) increasingly capture individuals with depressive symptoms outside of MDD who express both positive and negative self-relevant content. However, whether linguistic features vary with depressive symptoms outside the context of MDD and whether these associations differ based on the emotional valence of the recalled content (i.e., positive vs. negative) remains unclear. In the present study, undergraduate students (N = 457) were randomly assigned to write about a sad or happy personal experience in as much detail as possible. We assessed negative tone, positive tone, first-person pronoun usage, and affiliation words using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program. Greater depressive symptoms were associated with more negative tone and more first-person pronoun usage (i.e., greater self-focus) in the negative condition, as hypothesized, but depressive symptoms were not associated with linguistic features in the positive condition. Depressive symptoms did not relate to positive tone or use of affiliation words. Findings suggest that social-emotional biases present in depression may pertain to the processing of negative but not positive personal events and hold implications for identifying depressive symptoms in non-clinical and clinical settings and large linguistic databases.

The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-026-00395-4.