Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.

患有抑郁症的人容易出现适应不良的思维模式，称为认知扭曲，他们以过于消极和不准确的方式思考自己、世界和未来。这些扭曲与个人情绪、行为和语言的显着变化有关。我们假设社会可以经历类似的集体心理变化，这些变化反映在语言使用的历史记录中。在这里，我们调查了过去 125 年中超过 1400 万本书中认知扭曲的文本标记的流行情况，并观察到自 1980 年代以来它们的流行程度激增，达到超过大萧条和两次世界大战的水平。这种模式似乎不是由词义、出版和写作标准或 Google 图书样本的变化驱动的。