Psychological Trauma and Emotional Upheaval as Revealed in Academic Writing: The Case of COVID-19

Abstract

Trauma victims often respond to distress in systematic ways that are psychologically rich. People who face trauma or emotional upheavals, for example, try to make meaning of their experiences by putting in psychological effort to resolve their distress. 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 used over 1.8 million preprints from arXiv.org to evaluate how papers about COVID-19 were written compared to non-COVID-19 papers. The data suggest COVID-19 papers were written with more affect (specifically, negative emotion), more cognitive processing terms to indicate writers working through a crisis, and less analytic thinking to indicate an inward focus relative to non-COVID-19 papers. Study 2 (N = 74,809 published PLoS One papers) observed consistent emotion results across COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 papers, but cognitive processing and analytic thinking patterns were reversed. Study 3 (N = 361,189 published papers) replicated the Study 2 results across a more diverse set of journals. Together, emotional upheavals are associated with psychological correlates that are reflected in the language of scientists at scale. Having time to work through and manage a crisis, however, may reduce their prevalence in published academic papers. Implications for psychology of language research and trauma are discussed.