A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Schizophrenia Language
This provides insights into schizophrenia symptoms for mental health research, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to analyze language features in this domain.
The paper tackled the problem of analyzing language in schizophrenia by quantitatively and qualitatively measuring linguistic features in speech and written text, finding that patients score higher in fear and neuroticism, are more committed to beliefs, and show lower cohesion with significant p-values.
Schizophrenia is one of the most disabling mental health conditions to live with. Approximately one percent of the population has schizophrenia which makes it fairly common, and it affects many people and their families. Patients with schizophrenia suffer different symptoms: formal thought disorder (FTD), delusions, and emotional flatness. In this paper, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the language of patients with schizophrenia measuring various linguistic features in two modalities: speech and written text. We examine the following features: coherence and cohesion of thoughts, emotions, specificity, level of committed belief (LCB), and personality traits. Our results show that patients with schizophrenia score high in fear and neuroticism compared to healthy controls. In addition, they are more committed to their beliefs, and their writing lacks details. They score lower in most of the linguistic features of cohesion with significant p-values.