ArticleJournal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines2026
Smartphone language and resting-state EEG indicators of self-focused attention prospectively predict major depressive disorder risk in adolescents.
Article in Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pro-inflammatory markers interact with spontaneous theta oscillations to predict depression among adolescents.Brain, behavior, and immunity · 2026Article
- How adolescent depressive symptoms are associated with premature mortality: Behavioral and socioeconomic pathways across the life course.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
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14 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundCentral to major depressive disorder (MDD) onset and maintenance is maladaptive self-focused attention, which can be reliably indexed by greater: (a) usage of first-person singular pronouns (e.g., I) in natural language and (b) alpha oscillations in resting-state EEG. Integrating these largely parallel bodies of research, the present study sought to explicate the associations between, and prospective predictive utility of, linguistic and neural indicators of self-focused attention in adolescents with remitted MDD over 12 months.
methodsAt baseline, 126 adolescents (ages 13-18) with (n = 66) and without (n = 60) remitted MDD completed resting-state EEG. Retrospective interviews determined the occurrence of major depressive episodes (MDEs) during the follow-up period. A total of ~2.3 million messages were passively acquired from adolescents' smartphones, on which the proportion of first-person singular pronouns was derived.
resultsDuring the 12 months, 29 (23.0%) participants developed an MDE (28 remitted MDD, 1 control). Cox regression showed that while greater usage of first-person singular pronouns prior to MDE increased the risk for MDE (hazard ratio [HR] = 2.02, p < .001), greater resting-state alpha power at baseline decreased the risk for MDE (HR = 0.78, p = .001). Moreover, greater alpha power predicted subsequent first-person singular pronoun usage (β = 0.17, p = .004). Mediation analysis indicated a marginal suppression effect (bootstrapped indirect effect p < .10), such that accounting for first-person singular pronoun usage amplified the association between alpha power and MDE risk.
conclusionsFindings highlight functionally distinct alpha mechanisms and provide support for smartphone-based first-person singular pronoun usage as a neurobehavioral risk factor and a potentially promising intervention target for adolescent MDD.
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