Linguistic markers of depression: Insights from english-language tweets before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Research shows that the COVID-19 outbreak negatively affected people’s mental health with depression cases being the most prevalently reported mental disorder around the world. This motivated studies on the symptoms of depression through social media such as Twitter, with most of them focusing on behavioural changes in depressive individuals. Linguistic changes in tweets of depressed Twitter users however are under-researched. To date, research on linguistic markers of depression has been linked to self-focused attention and negativity bias in depressed individuals while other domains of cognitive theories of depression have remained relatively unexplored in linguistic studies. This gap in the literature is the motivation for the current paper on linguistic markers of depression in tweets during the pandemic. It focuses on sensitive markers of depression namely first-person singular pronouns, negative emotion words, and absolutist words as they reflect increased self-focus, negativity, and absolutist thinking in depressed individuals. The current study analyses the change in the use of these linguistic markers among depressed Twitter users based on tweets in English one year prior to and a year into COVID-19 pandemic. It also explores emerging linguistic markers of depression beyond the scope of self-focused attention, negativity bias, and absolutist thinking providing understanding of how depression manifests in language during global crises such as the pandemic.