Background
Adolescence has been identified as an important period for the development of self-concept [
1]. Developing advanced cognitive abilities such as abstract thinking, enables young people to construct more complex representations of who they are, i.e. their ‘self-concept’[
2,
3] and to hold complex mental images of themselves that include both positive and negative (e.g. “I am kind”; “I am ugly’” Hards, Fisk, Ellis & Reynolds, 2019). The development of the self-concept interacts with observable changes in mental health and well-being, including difficulties that frequently emerge during adolescence, e.g., major depression and social anxiety. For example, negative self-evaluation is one of the most frequently reported symptoms of depression amongst young people [
4].
Depressive disorders, as well as sub-threshold symptoms of depression, are common during adolescence [
5,
6]. A diagnosis of major depression during adolescence is associated with a range of immediate and long-term adverse consequences including an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviours [
7], difficulties in education and employment [
8], and relationships [
9]. The cognitive model of depression [
10] suggests that pervasive and sustained negative beliefs about the self, the world and the future (i.e. the ‘cognitive triad’) increase vulnerability to depression and after the onset of depression maintain low mood. Evidence-based treatments for depression in young people are moderately successful [
11,
12] but often fail to engage young people. These treatments are adapted from treatments developed for adults and thus may not integrate or tackle aspects depression that are characteristic of adolescents and which therefore are more salient and relevant to them, and more effective.
Negative self-evaluation is a symptom of major depression, a central feature of the cognitive model of depression and is highly characteristic of depression in young people. There is a well-established relationship between low self-esteem (i.e., a more negative self-evaluation) and depression, and low self-esteem predicts future depression symptoms [
13,
14]. However, few treatments, including Cognitive Behaviour Therapy [
15] explicitly address this symptom. Qualitative research with depressed adolescents suggests that they identify negative self-evaluation as a “big part of depression” and that it is not targeted enough in treatment [
14]. Thus, based on feedback from young people and results of previous studies, it is important to better understand the nature of self-evaluation in adolescents and its relationship with depression. This understanding may then be used to adapt psychological models and treatments to the specific experiences and needs of adolescents who have depression.
Self-evaluation can be measured in different ways, focusing on different aspects of the construct. Self-esteem is typically measured using the well-established self-report Rosenberg Self Esteem scale [
16]. The RSE is quick and standardised and provides a global assessment of self-esteem on a continuum from positive to negative. Self-evaluation can also be examined as an information processing bias. Self-referential processing refers to the process of how we use perceptions of our self, to guide the evaluation and interpretation of new information [
17]. Thus ‘negative self-referential processing’ refers to the tendency to easily associate negative perceptions about oneself (e.g., “annoying”) and difficulties associating positive evaluations (e.g., “smart”; [
18]. This is a well examined cognitive bias and studies have shown that compared to participants without a history of depression, formerly depressed patients show negatively biased self-referential processing when in a negative mood state [
19,
20]. Similarly, studies have shown that following a negative mood induction, adolescents recall significantly more negative self-descriptions than after a neutral mood induction [
21]. Thus this bias appears to be easily triggered (i.e. by a brief mood induction) and long lasting (i.e. in people with a history of depression). Individuals who have negative self-referent processing tend also to also have other information processing biases, including attention and memory biases [
19‐
21]). This co-occurrence of different information processes biases may also predict the onset of future depression episodes and thus constitute a potentially modifiable vulnerability factor [
23].
Studies examining negative self-referential processing typically use the Self Referential Encoding Task (SRET) task [
22,
23]. In this task participants are presented with a series of adjectives and are asked to rate the words for whether they are self-descriptive. Next, they are given a surprise recall task and asked to recall as many of the adjectives as they can. Using this task, depressed adolescents showed a negative self-referential bias. However, they also endorsed and remembered positive pro-social self-referential words at the same rate as non-depressed adolescents, suggesting that important aspects of positive self-evaluation may remain intact during depression [
24]. However, research has identified a specific limitation of using the SRET task with adolescents. A significant number of participants did not recognise or understand some of the words included in the SRET, i.e. ‘feeble’ and ‘pitiful’. This highlights the need to use stimuli that are designed for adolescents and reflect changes in how language is used over time. An alternative strategy to assess self-evaluation in adolescents would be to use adjectives that they themselves have generated to ensure these self-evaluations are familiar.
Anderson (1966) produced a set data norms for 555 descriptive words that have been used to study a range of psychological phenomena including gender stereotypes [
25], human attribution processes (self/other judgmental tasks; [
26] attachment styles and communication [
27], depression [
28‐
30] and self-evaluation in adolescents. For example, one study used trait-words selected from Anderson’s data norms to examine the development of self-evaluation and the impact of social comparison on the valence of self-evaluation across adolescents aged 9–25 years [
31]. Other studies have also used trait adjectives from Anderson’s date norms to examine self-appraisal in young adults and healthy adolescents [
32]. Anderson’s normative data is clearly flexible and widely used. However, as data were derived from adults and not from adolescents, there is a clear need to create an adolescent specific set of norms that is based on words generated by and used by adolescents rather than adults. Making this resource open-access is important as this could then be used alongside and compliment Anderson’s word-lists. One way in which self-evaluations could be collated is using the Twenty Statements Test (TST; 25), this measure invites participants to generate their own adjectives to describe themselves, in response to a standard prompt, “ I am …….”
Only one study has used an open-response measure to elicit adolescent self-evaluation and measure associations with depression [
33]. In this study, the TST was used, however authors coded statements as either ‘positive’, ‘negative’ or ‘neutral.’ A single score was then derived to reflect the overall valence of self-evaluation. Thus, linguistic properties of adolescent self-evaluation which may reflect important nuances in respect to depression remain unexplored. Thus, it may be useful to apply computer linguistic analysis such as Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; [
34] as this program codes words into pre-defined categories i.e., ‘positive emotion’ and ‘negative emotion’ and includes sub-categories such as ‘anxiety’ and ‘anger’. The application of LIWC in depression research has demonstrated potential in reflecting the biases typically characterised by depression such as in memory [
35] and language [
36]. Specifically, research has found that depressed adults tend to recall fewer positive emotion ‘words’ than healthy controls when asked to recall personal experiences (autobiographical memories; [
35]. Other literature has also shown increased use of first-person singular pronouns in depressed participants compared to never-depressed controls [
37]. Therefore, LIWC may be a useful tool to further explore the specifics of self-evaluation in respect to adolescent depression, given that different components of self-evaluation can be measured separately e.g., positive emotion, negative emotion, anxiety and anger.
The aim of the current study was two-fold; firstly, to examine the specific content of self-evaluation and present a bank of self-referential words generated by healthy adolescents and those with elevated symptoms of depression. This bank of data could be used alongside and complement Anderson’s existing data norms. Secondly, to use linguistic analysis (LIWC) to test the hypothesis that when describing themselves, adolescents with elevated symptoms of depression will use more negative emotion, anxiety, anger and sadness related words and fewer positive emotion words than healthy adolescents.
Discussion
One aim of the current study was to create and then share a new database of self-evaluation words, generated by adolescents with and without elevated symptoms of depression. We also compared self-evaluation by adolescents with elevated symptoms of depression and adolescents with low symptoms of depression. Our results suggest that many of the stimuli words used in current measures do not reflect vocabularies used by adolescents to describe themselves. For example, 31% of the positive words and 65% of negative words used in the SRET were not used by adolescents or were generated by fewer than 1% of young people in this study. Additionally, only 30% of the words spontaneously generated by adolescents to describe their self-evaluation are included in Anderson’s word list [
47]. These differences highlight why it is important to use words familiar and meaningful to adolescents when conducting research and developing research stimuli appropriate for this population.
An additional aim of this study was to examine the content of self-evaluation using LIWC. Consistent with Beck’s cognitive model of depression [
10], adolescents with elevated symptoms of depression described themselves using significantly more words classified as negative emotion, this was a large effect. They also used more anxiety and sadness words than non-depressed adolescents and this difference was a medium effect. Healthy adolescents used significantly more positive emotion words to describe themselves – again this was a large difference between the groups. These findings are consistent with other research which has used LIWC to examine the language used among depressed individuals [
37]. For example, [
48] found a high proportion of negative emotion words when examining online conversations between patients with Major Depressive Disorder. Importantly, our study represents the first time that a linguistic program has been applied to code self-evaluation generated by adolescents and offers important advantages. Namely, LIWC is the gold-standard tool used to quantify psychological content in written language [
44] and uses a rigorously tested coding scheme to categorise data. Secondly, by using LIWC categories it is possible to measure depression affect; this is an essential step in understanding the nature of self-evaluation in this population. However, only single words (or very short responses i.e., < 3 words) were analysed in this study. LIWC is commonly used to analyse articles, expressive writing, blogs, novels etc. [
34]. Therefore, future research should use methods which elicit more detailed descriptions from participants as further exploration of self-evaluation using LIWC would be beneficial.
This study also found that adolescents with elevated symptoms of depression generated significantly fewer positive words such as ‘Happy’ and ‘Funny” than healthy adolescents. However, despite this, adolescents with elevated symptoms of depression were able to generate some positive self-evaluation; specifically, they generated prosocial words such as ‘Kind’ and ‘Caring’ as often as healthy young people. These findings provide important contributions to our understanding of self-evaluation in young people as they suggest that despite clinically significant symptoms of depression and negative self-evaluation, some aspects of positive self-evaluation were persistent. It may be that prosocial attributes are ‘protected’ as they are highly salient to adolescents as they typically become more oriented towards interpersonal relationships with their peers during this developmental period [
49]. Future research could explore this with qualitative methods to examine the content of self-evaluation in more detail.
The results of this study have several important practical and clinical implications. Firstly, using this database, it is possible to identify words more frequently used by adolescents with elevated symptoms of depression and therefore to build a profile of the content of self-evaluation in this population. This is important given that there has been limited investigations about how adolescents with elevated symptoms of depression describe or think about themselves even though negative self-evaluation is a hallmark symptoms of depression [
4]. Secondly, the findings suggest that in respect to depression, a self-evaluation which includes more negative and less positive emotion is typical in young people, consistent with theory. Contrary to the cognitive theory of depression [
5], negative self-evaluation among those with elevated symptoms of depression did not relate to feelings of ‘‘worthless’, ‘useless’ and ‘failure’ but instead were more frequently feelings of ‘tired’ ‘sad’ and ‘stressed’. This may reflect the availability and salience of specific ideas and words to young people and the current cultural usage of emotional language. Thirdly, given that this study found evidence to support the presence of some ‘protected’ positive self-evaluation in adolescents with elevated depression, this prosocial self-evaluation may be a useful focus of treatment for depression. Specifically, CBT designed to target low self-esteem and negative self-evaluation has the aim of reducing negative beliefs and replacing these with more positive alternatives [
50]. Therefore, it may be the case that with adolescents, prosocial self-evaluation is likely to be a helpful foundation. For example, positive, prosocial self-evaluation may act as building block in therapy and may be a foundation to improve self-evaluation overall. For example, ‘I am a kind person’ could translate and become ‘I am a good person’ [
24]. In line with this, given that self-evaluation is likely to change during treatment, it may be important to assess this and monitor it during treatment. Using the adolescent data presented here, it would be possible to construct a self-evaluation measure using vocabularies and descriptions generated by young people themselves.
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