ArticleChild and adolescent psychiatry and mental health2023
'I am tired, sad and kind': self-evaluation and symptoms of depression in adolescents.
Article in Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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5 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Vicious Cycle Between Parental Psychological Control and Depressive Symptoms Among Chinese Early Adolescents: Highlighting the Mediating Role of Positivity and Sex Differences.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2026Article
- A longitudinal exploration of self-perception, mental images of the self, and depression in young people.JCPP advances · 2026Article
- Affective language and transdiagnostic symptom burden in clinically referred adolescents: a multicenter Turkish sentence-completion study.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- What do they look for and what do they find? A coproduced qualitative study on young people's experiences of searching for mental health information online.Psychology and psychotherapy · 2025Article
- The inner critical voice among university students and patients with depression - A linguistic analysis of self-criticism.PloS one · 2025Article
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Abstract
introductionAlthough self-evaluation i.e., negative perceptions of the self is a common depression symptom in adolescents, little is known about how this population spontaneously describe their self and available data on adolescent self-evaluation is limited. This study aimed to generate and report on a list of words used by healthy adolescents and those with elevated depression symptoms to describe their self-evaluation. Linguistic analysis (LIWC) was then used to compare self-evaluation between the two groups.
methodsAdolescents aged 13-18 years (n = 549) completed a measure of depression symptoms (the Mood and Feelings Questionnaire) and a measure of self-evaluation (the Twenty Statements Test). Responses were then collated and presented in a freely accessible resource and coded using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) analysis.
resultsSelf-evaluation words generated by adolescents were uploaded to a publicly accessible site for future research: https://doi.org/10.15125/BATH-01234 . Adolescents with elevated depression symptoms described themselves as 'Tired' and 'Sad' more than healthy adolescents. However, there was no difference between groups in respect to their use of specific positive, prosocial self-evaluation 'words' (i.e., 'Caring' and 'Kind). Following Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) analysis, adolescents with elevated depression symptoms generated significantly more words than healthy adolescents, generated more words classified as negative emotion, anxiety and sadness and generated fewer words classified positive emotion than healthy adolescents.
conclusionsAs predicted by the cognitive model of depression, our findings suggest that adolescents with elevated symptoms of depression generated more negative self-evaluation words than healthy adolescents; however they also generated prosocial positive self-evaluation words at the same rate as non-depressed adolescents. These novel data therefore identify an 'island' of resilience that could be targeted and amplified by psychological treatments for adolescent depression, and thus provide an additional technique of change.
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