Natural language sentiment as an indicator of depression and anxiety symptoms: a longitudinal mixed methods study1

The study tested how the use of positive- (e.g. beautiful) and negative-valenced (e.g. horrible) words in natural language and its change in time affects the severity of depression and anxiety symptoms among depressed and non-depressed individuals. This longitudinal mixed methods study (N = 40 participants, n = 1440 narratives) with three measurements within a year showed that at the between-person level the use of negative-valenced words was strongly associated with the increase in anxiety and depression symptoms over time while the use of positive-valenced words was slightly associated with the decrease in anxiety and depression symptom. These effects were not supported for within-person level (i.e. changes in word usage). No significant differences were observed in the effects between depressed and non-depressed groups. Summing up, the overall use of positive- and negative-valenced words (particularly negative-valenced words) had a stronger effect on the severity of psychopathological symptoms than their change over time. The results were discussed in the context of natural language processing and its application in diagnosing depression and anxiety symptoms.

Are Intelligent People Better Liars? Relationships between Cognitive Abilities and Credible Lying

Lying is essential to social communication. Despite years of research, its detection still poses many challenges. This is partly because some individuals are perceived as truthful and reliable, even when lying. However, relatively little is known about these effective liars. In our study, we focused on the cognitive functioning of effective liars. We tested 400 participants who completed tasks measuring executive functions, verbal fluency, and fluid intelligence, and also made four statements (two true and two false, half of them written and half oral). The reliability of the statements was then assessed. Only fluid intelligence was found to be relevant for reliable lying. This relationship was only evident for oral statements, suggesting that the importance of intelligence is highlighted when statements are made spontaneously without prior preparation.

Describing a critical life event and its psychological consequences: The type of language used by patients suffering from depression and its relationship with personality development

Information on personality development (and its linguistic predictors) in the aftermath of a critical life event among depressive patients is relatively limited. The study’s aim was to verify two hypotheses: (1) Participants with depression will use concrete rather than abstract language to describe their most recent critical life event and its psychological consequences and (2) The more abstract the language used, the higher the level of personality development. 16 Cognitive Behavioral Therapy patients suffering from depression participated in the study (M = 34 years old; SD = 4.02). Their level of personality development was assessed qualitatively by two independent coders. The coding system was based on the Positive Disintegration Theory (Dąbrowski 1964). We used typology from the Linguistic Category Model (Semin and Fiedler 1991) to analyse the level of abstractness vs. concreteness. Depressed patients were classified as either abstract language speakers or concrete language speakers. There were equal numbers of both types of speakers. Moreover participants consistently used one type of language, regardless of whether they were describing the critical life event itself or its psychological consequences. As expected, using higher levels of language abstractness when speaking correlated with possessing higher levels of personality development. Our findings provide practitioners with useful knowledge on the benefits of using abstract language to improve supportive strategies when dealing with people in crisis and modify the psychotherapeutic protocols used to treat depression.

The Effects of Working Memory Training on Brain Activity

This study aimed to investigate if two weeks of working memory (WM) training on a progressive N-back task can generate changes in the activity of the underlying WM neural network. Forty-six healthy volunteers (23 training and 23 controls) were asked to perform the N-back task during three fMRI scanning sessions: (1) before training, (2) after the half of training sessions, and (3) at the end. Between the scanning sessions, the experimental group underwent a 10-session training of working memory with the use of an adaptive version of the N-back task, while the control group did not train anything. The N-back task in the scanning sessions was relatively easy (n = 2) in order to ensure high accuracy and a lack of between-group differences at the behavioral level. Such training-induced differences in neural efficiency were expected. Behavioral analyses revealed improved performance of both groups on the N-back task. However, these improvements resulted from the test-retest effect, not the training outside scanner. Performance on the non-trained stop-signal task did not demonstrate any transfer effect. Imaging analysis showed changes in activation in several significant clusters, with overlapping regions of interest in the frontal and parietal lobes. However, patterns of between-session changes of activation did not show any effect of training. The only finding that can be linked with training consists in strengthening the correlation between task performance accuracy and activation of the parietal regions of the neural network subserving working memory (left superior parietal lobule and right supramarginal gyrus posterior). These results suggest that the effects of WM training consist in learning that, in order to ensure high accuracy in the criterion task, activation of the parietal regions implicated in working memory updating must rise.

Incidental Attitude Formation via the Surveillance Task: A Preregistered Replication of the Olson and Fazio (2001) Study

Evaluative conditioning is one of the most widely studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance task is a highly cited evaluative-conditioning paradigm and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for evaluative-conditioning effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel conceptual, theoretical, and applied developments. Yet few published studies have used this task, and most are characterized by small samples and small effect sizes. We conducted a high-powered (N = 1,478 adult participants), preregistered close replication of the original surveillance-task study (Olson & Fazio, 2001). We obtained evidence for a small evaluative-conditioning effect when "aware" participants were excluded using the original criterion-therefore replicating the original effect. However, no such effect emerged when three other awareness criteria were used. We suggest that there is a need for caution when using evidence from the surveillance-task effect to make theoretical and practical claims about "unaware" evaluative-conditioning effects.