Psychological trauma and emotional upheaval as revealed in academic writing: The case of COVID-19.
Cogn Emot
; 36(1): 9-22, 2022 02.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1585562
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
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Psychological Trauma
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Experimental Studies
Limits:
Humans
Language:
English
Journal:
Cogn Emot
Year:
2022
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
02699931.2021.2022602
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