Psychological trauma and emotional upheaval as revealed in academic writing: The case of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The current paper used a preregistered set of language dimensions to indicate how scientists psychologically managed the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects. Study 1 evaluated over 1.8 million preprints from arXiv.org and assessed how papers written during the COVID-19 pandemic reflected patterns of psychological trauma and emotional upheaval compared to those written before the pandemic. The data suggest papers written during the pandemic contained more affect and more cognitive processing terms to indicate writers working through a crisis than papers written before the pandemic. Study 2 (N = 74,744 published PLoS One papers) observed consistent emotion results, though cognitive processing patterns were inconsistent. Papers written specifically about COVID-19 contained more emotion than those not written about COVID-19. Finally, Study 3 (N = 361,189 published papers) replicated the Study 2 emotion results across more diverse journals and observed papers written during the pandemic contained a greater rate of cognitive processing terms, but a lower rate of analytic thinking, than papers written before the pandemic. These data suggest emotional upheavals are associated with psychological correlates reflected in the language of scientists at scale. Implications for psychology of language research and trauma are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Trauma
• emotional upheaval
• psychological distress
• automated text analysis
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “Peri” is a prefix describing a time “during” an event. Since the pandemic was ongoing at the time of data collection and this writing, “peri” is used instead of “post.” The terms “peri-pandemic” and “during pandemic” were used interchangeably for clarity at different points in the paper.

2 https://www.kaggle.com/Cornell-University/arxiv

3 Analytic thinking = [articles + prepositions - pronouns - auxiliary verbs - adverb - conjunctions - negations] from LIWC scores (Jordan et al., 2019).

4 In all analyses, “pre-pandemic” was the reference group (see supplement). When a main effect of topic (COVID-related vs. non-COVID-related) was evaluated in Studies 2 and 3, “non-COVID-related” was the reference group.

5 R²c represents variance explained by the fixed and random effects in linear mixed models from the MuMIn package in R (Bartoń, 2020)

6 https://www.kaggle.com/allen-institute-for-ai/CORD-19-research-challenge

7 In some cases, only a year of publication was provided in the article metadata. To remain conservative with the estimate of papers published before or during the pandemic, any paper labeled “2019” was placed in the “before” group of the time factor. Any paper labeled “2020” or later was placed in the “during” group of the time factor.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.