Psychological trauma and emotional upheaval as revealed in academic writing: The case of COVID-19

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 evaluated over 1.8 million preprints from arXiv.org and assessed how papers written during the COVID-19 pandemic reflected patterns of psychological trauma and emotional upheaval compared to those written before the pandemic. The data suggest papers written during the pandemic contained more affect and more cognitive processing terms to indicate writers working through a crisis than papers written before the pandemic. Study 2 (N = 74,744 published PLoS One papers) observed consistent emotion results, though cognitive processing patterns were inconsistent. Papers written specifically about COVID-19 contained more emotion than those not written about COVID-19. Finally, Study 3 (N = 361,189 published papers) replicated the Study 2 emotion results across more diverse journals and observed papers written during the pandemic contained a greater rate of cognitive processing terms, but a lower rate of analytic thinking, than papers written before the pandemic. These data suggest emotional upheavals are associated with psychological correlates reflected in the language of scientists at scale. Implications for psychology of language research and trauma are discussed.