Depression is characterized by a self-focused negative attentional bias, which is often reflected in everyday language use. In a prospective writing study, we explored whether the association between depressive symptoms and negative, self-focused language varies across social contexts. College students (N = 243) wrote about a recent interaction with a person they care deeply about. Depression symptoms positively correlated with negative emotion words and first-person singular pronouns (or negative self-focus) when writing about a recent interaction with romantic partners or, to a lesser extent, friends, but not family members. The pattern of results was more pronounced when participants perceived greater self-other overlap (i.e., interpersonal closeness) with their romantic partner. Findings regarding how the linguistic profile of depression differs by type of relationship may inform more effective methods of clinical diagnosis and treatment.

In this summary, we discuss our approach to the CLPsych Shared Task and its initial results. For our predictions in each task, we used a recursive partitioning algorithm (decision trees) to select from our set of features, which were primarily dictionary scores and counts of individual words. We focused primarily on Task A, which aimed to predict suicide risk, as rated by a team of expert clinicians (Shing et al., 2018), based on language used in SuicideWatch posts on Reddit. Category-level findings highlight the potential importance of social and moral language categories. Word-level correlates of risk levels underline the value of fine-grained data-driven approaches, revealing both theory-consistent and potentially novel correlates of suicide risk that may motivate future research.