@article{oai:naist.repo.nii.ac.jp:00004341,
 author = {Manabe, Masae and Liew, Kongmeng and Yada, Shuntaro and Wakamiya, Shoko and 荒牧, 英治 and Aramaki, Eiji},
 issue = {8},
 journal = {JMIR Formative Research},
 month = {Aug},
 note = {Background: Internalizing mental illnesses associated with psychological distress are often underdetected. Text-based detectionusing natural language processing (NLP) methods is increasingly being used to complement conventional detection efforts.However, these approaches often rely on self-disclosure through autobiographical narratives that may not always be possible,especially in the context of the collectivistic Japanese culture.Objective: We propose the use of narrative writing as an alternative resource for mental illness detection in youth. Accordingly,in this study, we investigated the textual characteristics of narratives written by youth with psychological distress; our researchfocuses on the detection of psychopathological tendencies in written imaginative narratives.Methods: Using NLP tools such as stylometric measures and lexicon-based sentiment analysis, we examined short narrativesfrom 52 Japanese youth (mean age 19.8 years, SD 3.1) obtained through crowdsourcing. Participants wrote a short narrativeintroduction to an imagined story before completing a questionnaire to quantify their tendencies toward psychological distress.Based on this score, participants were categorized into higher distress and lower distress groups. The written narratives were thenanalyzed using NLP tools and examined for between-group differences. Although outside the scope of this study, we also carriedout a supplementary analysis of narratives written by adults using the same procedure.Results: Youth demonstrating higher tendencies toward psychological distress used significantly more positive (happiness-related)words, revealing differences in valence of the narrative content. No other significant differences were observed between the highand low distress groups.Conclusions: Youth with tendencies toward mental illness were found to write more positive stories that contained morehappiness-related terms. These results may potentially have widespread implications on psychological distress screening on onlineplatforms, particularly in cultures such as Japan that are not accustomed to self-disclosure. Although the mechanisms that wepropose in explaining our results are speculative, we believe that this interpretation paves the way for future research in onlinesurveillance and detection efforts.},
 title = {Estimation of Psychological Distress in Japanese Youth Through Narrative Writing: Text-Based Stylometric and Sentiment Analyses},
 volume = {5},
 year = {2021},
 yomi = {アラマキ, エイジ}
}