The authors use a set of phrases which I gather are well-known in the field, and prepared similar sets for German and for Spanish (which they meant to use as a control). They were looking for (A) catastrophizing, (B) dichotomous reasoning, (C) disqualifying the positive, (D) emotional reasoning, (E) fortune telling, (F) labeling and mislabeling, (G) magnification and minimization, (H) mental filtering, (I) mindreading, (J) overgeneralizing, (K) personalizing, and (L) should statements.
They used "the third version 2019 release of the Google Books n-gram data" and the google tools, and prepared plots of 125 years of frequency of these classes of phrases appearing in books, by year.
They see a spike in German starting in about 1943, which sort of makes sense--it was starting to become clear that the thousand-years was likely to be quite a bit shorter, so you might see more people expressing "cognitive distortions." -- Although I'd have guessed that the full-court press of Nazi propoganda starting in the 30's might have appeared in some of their categories. That's probably a naive view, though.
Anyhow, Spanish was meant to be a control because it is so wide-spread that one single culture shouldn't dominate. That may not have been a good guess.
Never mind WWII, though. Almost every category except the "Should statements" shows a dramatic spike in the rate starting in the late 90's. That's a curious change in style--and it's found in all 3 languages.
The obvious question is "Can a culture experience cognitive distortions?" My intuitive answer is "Sure, cultures can go mad," and I could proffer the daily news as proof. Are they seeing a culture of twisted thinking in our printed media?
I'd like to hear what real experts think.
I am not a real expert, though I did understand what they were talking about WRT individuals with depression and anxiety disorders. I had never considered applying that to whole societies. It was a clever idea, and I think they blocked some exits that would have ruined the study. It is further interesting that in English, the "should" statements show the reverse pattern.
ReplyDeleteIt is hard not to fit this to my prior of increase in internet use having unintended negative emotional and social effects. English taking off a few years before German and Spanish would fit that as well. The worrisome part is that most of the categories should nearly identical patterns. Only a few seemed to have an earlier start.