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