Linguistic Self-Focus, Depression, and Life Stress in Adolescents: Leveraging Archival Interview Data to Capture Psycholinguistic Markers of Psychopathology

Efforts to understand psychopathology and related processes via psycholinguistics are expanding across multiple disciplines. “I-talk”, operationalized as the proportion of first-person singular pronouns within a sample of naturalistic speech, is suggested to indicate self-focused attention and low self-distancing, and is associated with depression and related processes, including emotional dysregulation, and brooding. However, I-talk in adolescents has been underexplored, limiting understanding of psycholinguistic markers of emotional health during a key developmental period. Further, it is unclear how environmental risk factors for depression, such as life stress, relate to I-talk. Audio recordings of contextual-threat-based semi-structured life stress interviews may be a viable source of psycholinguistic data, introducing underrealized potential for archival data analysis with existing high-quality studies. Adolescents (N = 241, M_age = 15.9 years, 53% female, 46% male, and 1% other) completed audio-recorded semi-structured life stress interviews, which were (a) transcribed and analyzed with psycholinguistic software and (b) team-coded using contextual threat methods. Participants also completed interviews and questionnaires on emotional functioning. Preregistered analyses revealed that I-talk was associated with higher life stress exposure, brooding, and self-reported (but not interviewer-rated) depressive symptoms. However, these associations were no longer significant in most tests of robustness, including controlling for chronic and episodic stress and for self-reported depression. Results offer tentative support for a link between I-talk, depression, brooding and key environmental factors (life stress) among adolescents, and highlight the utility of archival interview transcriptions as psycholinguistic data sources.