ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Naturalistic Online Language as a Marker of Depression in Midlife and Older Adults: Computational Text Analysis of Bluesky and Reddit Posts.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Prevalence of Cognitive Distortion Markers in a Suicide Prevention Chat Service: Mixed Methods Study.JMIR mental health · 2026Article
- History as Therapy: A Novel Interdisciplinary Framework for Meaning-making and Well-being.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2026Article
- Anxiety and Depression are Associated with More Distorted Thinking on Social Media: A Longitudinal Multi-Method Study.Cognitive therapy and research · 2025Article
- Cognitive distortions are associated with increasing political polarization.Communications psychology · 2025Article
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- GPT is an effective tool for multilingual psychological text analysis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Detecting adolescent depression through passive monitoring of linguistic markers in smartphone communication.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2024Article
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- The heritability and persistence of social class in England.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Modern views of machine learning for precision psychiatry.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2022Review
- Belief traps: Tackling the inertia of harmful beliefs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Dynamics of ranking.Nature communications · 2022Article
- The rise and fall of rationality in language.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Prevalence and Temporal Trends Analysis of Screening and Diagnostic Instruments in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Text Mining Study.JMIR mental health · 2021Article
- Reply to Schmidt et al.: A robust surge of cognitive distortions in historical language.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Uncontrolled corpus composition drives an apparent surge in cognitive distortions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Unveiling the cognitive burden: The impact of stigma on distorted thinking among individuals living with hepatitis B.International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHPArticle
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7 authors.
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Abstract
Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual's mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.
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