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      Reading between the lines: the lay assessment of subclinical depression from written self-descriptions.

      1 , ,
      Journal of personality

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          Abstract

          This study investigated how laypersons assess subclinical depression in others from 2 forms of written self-descriptions: personal diaries and online blogs. Fifty-seven target participants wrote essays describing their personality as they would in each context. Naïve judges then rated targets' depression from the 2 sets of self-descriptions. The judges achieved high and comparable levels of accuracy in the 2 self-descriptions by basing their impressions on linguistic cues indicative of depression-related emotional, cognitive, temporal, and social processes. Consistent with the idea that diaries particularly afford the disclosure of socially sensitive concerns whereas online blogs particularly afford the disclosure of socially acceptable concerns, several cues were indicative of depression only in the targets' diaries (sadness words, cognitive mechanism words, metaphysical references) or their online blogs (e.g., swear words, references to sleep). For most of these cues, judges were implicitly aware of their context-specific diagnosticity.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          J Pers
          Journal of personality
          1467-6494
          0022-3506
          Apr 2010
          : 78
          : 2
          Affiliations
          [1 ] University of Southern California, Department of Psychology, 3620 McClintock Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90089-1061, USA. aubreyro@usc.edu
          Article
          JOPY627
          10.1111/j.1467-6494.2010.00627.x
          20433631
          599c5296-def2-4a53-a997-4bcf77264b9f
          History

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