Linguistic Features and Psychological States: The Case of Virginia Woolf.

Xiaowei Du

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.823313

Abstract

This study investigated the relation between psychological states and linguistic features with the case of Virginia Woolf. We analyzed the data from The Diary of Virginia Woolf and Virginia Woolf: Biography by automatic text analysis and statistical analysis, including stepwise multiple regression and Deep Learning algorithm. The results suggested that the significant linguistic features can jointly predict the psychological states of Virginia Woolf, including the emotional value of anger, the absolutist word “everything,” and the total of first-person plural pronouns. In addition, we found that the total use of first-person plural pronouns and the emotional value of anger were negatively related to mental health of Virginia Woolf. While the use of the absolutist word “everything” was positively related to mental health of Virginia Woolf. Meanwhile, we developed a model that can predict the psychological states of Virginia Woolf, with 86.9% accuracy. We discussed the findings and enumerated the limitations of this study at the end of the paper. The results not only complemented previous studies in the understanding of the relation between language and psychological health, but also facilitated timely identification, intervention, and prevention of mental disorders.

Highlights

The relation between psychological states and linguistic features recently has attracted the interest of researchers
We found the significant linguistic features that jointly predicted the psychological states of Virginia Woolf after examining a total of 65 linguistic features, respectively, in the stepwise multiple regression analysis
The significant linguistic features were the total usage of first-person plural pronouns, i.e., “we_our_us,” the emotional value of anger, and the absolutist word “everything.” The other linguistic features of this study had no significant effect on predicting the psychological states of Virginia Woolf (p-values were larger than 0.05)

Summary

Introduction

The relation between psychological states and linguistic features recently has attracted the interest of researchers. Some studies have explored the relation between psychological states and linguistic features. These studies are roughly categorized into two types. Psychological states are assessed by the way people write about their experiences (Barnes et al, 2007; Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010; Al-Mosaiwi and Johnstone, 2018; Kim et al, 2019). Psychological states are predicted by factors such as the diachronic changes of linguistic features in written texts (Rodrigues et al, 2016; Ziemer and Korkmaz, 2017; Eichstaedt et al, 2018; Boukil et al, 2019)

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