Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades @acerbialberto @oleg_sobchuk @replicatedtypo @quadrismegistus @Ted_Underwood https://t.co/bnWSb1Z8M2
— Bill Benzon, aka The Danish Space Laser (@bbenzon) July 25, 2021
Significance of linked article:
Can entire societies become more or less depressed over time? Here, we look for the historical traces of cognitive distortions, thinking patterns that are strongly associated with internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety, in millions of books published over the course of the last two centuries in English, Spanish, and German. We find a pronounced “hockey stick” pattern: Over the past two decades the textual analogs of cognitive distortions surged well above historical levels, including those of World War I and II, after declining or stabilizing for most of the 20th century. Our results point to the possibility that recent socioeconomic changes, new technology, and social media are associated with a surge of cognitive distortions.
Abstract from linked article:
Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.
CORRECTION – Alas, the study is deeply flawed [7.26.21]
The background here is that in February 2020, Google generated a new version of their corpus for the ngrams browser. The 2012 and 2009 corpora were accompanied by academic articles, but the 2020 one seems to have been basically undocumented. (I welcome correction here?).
— Benjamin Schmidt (@benmschmidt) July 26, 2021
Check out the whole thread on Twitter.
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