Linguistic Distancing and Emotion Regulation: Theoretical, Developmental, and Translational Perspectives

Abstract

Psychological disorders, especially internalizing disorders like anxiety and depression, cause immense human and economic burden across the globe. Prior work shows that internalizing disorders are characterized by perturbations in emotion regulation (i.e., the strategies people use to change how they feel), with excessive use of maladaptive strategies that reduce short-term distress but maintain long-term impairment and insufficient use of adaptive strategies that allow individuals to escape these cycles of impairment. Developing tools that identify poor emotion regulation and improve this critical affective skill could help address the global burden of psychopathology. This dissertation approaches this problem by focusing on a potential linguistic signature of effective emotion regulation (called linguistic distancing), in which shifting one’s language to separate oneself from a stressor is posited to facilitate adaptive emotion regulation. Theoretical and empirical research supporting relations between linguistic distancing, emotion regulation, and mental health are summarized in the general introduction. Paper 1 reports on two studies demonstrating that linguistic distancing both tracks successful emotion regulation and can be used to down-regulate negative affect (i.e., linguistic distancing can both measure and manipulate emotion regulation). Paper 2 takes a developmental perspective, showing that linguistic distancing tracks successful emotion regulation as early as age 10. Paper 3 takes a translational perspective, providing initial evidence that linguistic distance is related to the severity of clients’ internalizing symptoms and their treatment outcomes in a large real-world corpus of therapy transcripts. Together, evidence from this dissertation supports the notion that linguistic distance is a psycholinguistic marker of effective emotion regulation and mental health across childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, laying the groundwork for future research that uses linguistic distancing as a tool for detecting and intervening on psychological symptoms. Evidence from this dissertation supports an overarching theoretical model in which taking a distanced perspective on one’s habitual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, building an abstract model that identifies causal relations between these psychological constructs, and learning skills to intervene on this abstract model are key components of psychotherapy and general well-being. Future directions for testing this model and addressing open questions raised by this dissertation are presented in the general discussion.