Revealing semantic and emotional structure of suicide notes with cognitive network science.

ABSTRACT: Understanding how people who commit suicide perceive their cognitive states and emotions represents an important open scientific challenge. We build upon cognitive network science, psycholinguistics and semantic frame theory to introduce a network representation of suicidal ideation as expressed in multiple suicide notes. By reconstructing the knowledge structure of such notes, we reveal interconnections between the ideas and emotional states of people who committed suicide through an analysis of emotional balance motivated by structural balance theory, semantic prominence and emotional profiling. Our results indicate that connections between positively- and negatively-valenced terms give rise to a degree of balance that is significantly higher than in a null model where the affective stru

SUBMITTER: Teixeira AS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8484592 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature