The Structure and Content of Meaning in Speech Reflects Mental Health
Abstract
Mental health shapes the progression and content of thought. Studies have linked depression, anxiety, and stress with repetitive negative thoughts, but it remains unclear whether these disturbances are reflected in the structure of an individual's speech. We introduce an approach to quantify the structure of thought as expressed in language, applying it to memory recountings from 82 individuals across six psychotherapy sessions. We model each recounting’s semantic progression with contextual embeddings, and use persistent homology to identify loops of meaning, as recountings circle back upon themselves. More loops are associated with depression, anxiety, stress, and negative affect, and with negative self-referential language, implicating them as geometric markers of negative fixation and rumination. Semantic content also relates to mental health. However, neither semantic structure nor content mediate therapeutic improvement. These findings reveal that the semantic structure of speech offers a quantitative window into thought disturbances in depressive and anxiety disorders.
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BibTeX
@misc{leckie2026structure,
title = {{The Structure and Content of Meaning in Speech Reflects Mental Health}},
author = {Luke Leckie and Alicia Meuret and Thomas Ritz and Olivia Losiewicz and Michelle G. Craske and Jacob G. Foster},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/we2gj_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/we2gj_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The Structure and Content of Meaning in Speech Reflects Mental Health
AU - Luke Leckie
AU - Alicia Meuret
AU - Thomas Ritz
AU - Olivia Losiewicz
AU - Michelle G. Craske
AU - Jacob G. Foster
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/15
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/we2gj_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/we2gj_v1/
AB - Mental health shapes the progression and content of thought. Studies have linked depression, anxiety, and stress with repetitive negative thoughts, but it remains unclear whether these disturbances are reflected in the structure of an individual's speech. We introduce an approach to quantify the structure of thought as expressed in language, applying it to memory recountings from 82 individuals across six psychotherapy sessions. We model each recounting’s semantic progression with contextual embeddings, and use persistent homology to identify loops of meaning, as recountings circle back upon themselves. More loops are associated with depression, anxiety, stress, and negative affect, and with negative self-referential language, implicating them as geometric markers of negative fixation and rumination. Semantic content also relates to mental health. However, neither semantic structure nor content mediate therapeutic improvement. These findings reveal that the semantic structure of speech offers a quantitative window into thought disturbances in depressive and anxiety disorders.
ER -