Language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades

Finally, we previously showed that the prevalence of the CDS n-grams in the language of individuals with depression is not affected by the emotional valence of the n-grams or the presence of personal pronouns; hence, a language trend toward more emotional language or use of personal pronouns is not likely to affect our results. Second, the choice of CDS n-grams could lead to a "Recency bias" in our results, explaining their rise in prevalence in recent decades. We control for this effect with a null model that samples random n-grams more frequently from recent books, due to rapidly increasing publication volume since 1895, thereby inducing a bias toward more recent language. Although CDS n-gram prevalence was shown to be higher in individuals with depression and our composition of CDS n-grams closely follows the framework of cognitive distortions established by Beck, they do not constitute an individual diagnostic criterion with respect to authors, readers, and the general public. This translation mainly focused on retaining the cognitive distortion expression of an n-gram in the target language. Each n-gram in the CDS set of each language occurred in every year from 1895 to 2019, indicating continuous coverage for all individual CDS n-grams. The requirement for each null-model n-gram to have at least 100 y of coverage since 1895 also favors more recent n-grams because more data will be available in recent years.