The Expressions of Depression and Anxiety in Chinese Psycho-counseling: Usage of First-person Singular Pronoun and Negative Emotional Words

2025-07-18

AI Summary

This study investigates the relationship between linguistic features—specifically first-person singular pronouns and negative emotion words—and symptom severity of depression and anxiety within Chinese online counseling contexts. A corpus comprising 735 authentic counseling sessions was constructed and linguistically annotated using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) for lexical frequency quantification. Associations were rigorously tested via generalized linear mixed-effects models, controlling for session-level and participant-level random effects. Results revealed a statistically significant positive association between negative emotion word frequency and both depression and anxiety severity; however, first-person singular pronoun usage showed no significant variation across diagnostic groups. These findings challenge the Western individualistic assumption that heightened self-referential language universally signals psychological distress, providing the first empirical evidence in Chinese contexts for cultural modulation of psycholinguistic markers. The study thus advances cross-cultural research on linguistic correlates of mental health and informs the development of culturally adapted digital mental health assessment tools.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and Morphology
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Affective Computing
• Computer Vision: Language and Vision

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Large Language Models (LLM) for user modeling and recommendation

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between linguistic expressions and psychological states of depression and anxiety within Chinese psycho-counseling interactions, focusing specifically on the usage of first-person singular pronouns and negative emotional words. Utilizing a corpus derived from 735 online counseling sessions, the analysis employed a general linear mixed-effect model to assess linguistic patterns quantified by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. Results indicate a significant positive correlation between the frequency of negative emotional words and the severity of both depressive and anxious states among clients. However, contrary to prior findings predominantly derived from English-language contexts, the usage frequency of first-person singular pronouns did not vary significantly with the clients' psychological conditions. These outcomes are discussed within the framework of cultural distinctions between collectivist Chinese contexts and individualistic Western settings, as well as the interactive dynamics unique to psycho-counseling conversations. The findings highlight the nuanced influence of cultural and conversational contexts on language use in mental health communications, providing insights into psycholinguistic markers relevant to therapeutic practices in Chinese-speaking populations.

Problem

• Examining links between Chinese psycho-counseling language and depression/anxiety
• Assessing first-person pronoun and negative word usage in therapy sessions
• Exploring cultural impacts on linguistic markers in mental health communication

Innovation

• Used LIWC software for linguistic analysis
• Applied linear mixed-effect model
• Analyzed 735 online counseling sessions