Abstract / Summary
Identity diffusion – a fragmented sense of self and others maintained by splitting-based defenses – is a core feature of impaired personality functioning, theorized to involve heightened negative affectivity and affective instability. Evidence from other psychopathologies suggests that markers of affective disturbances can be automatically extracted from spontaneous speech, yet the linguistic correlates of identity diffusion have rarely been examined – particularly in adolescents, the age group in which personality pathology assessment is most challenging but also most consequential for early intervention.Transcripts of the Structured Interview of Personality Organization (STIPO) for adolescents were analyzed in a sample of 72 German-speaking participants (50 patients, 22 healthy controls) spanning the full spectrum from consolidated identity to severe identity diffusion. An interpretable lexicon-based sentiment analysis framework combined word frequency measures (LIWC) with continuous word-level valence indices (VADER), capturing both the prevalence and the dynamics of emotional tone.Greater identity diffusion was associated with higher affective variability (r = .48–.55), a more negative overall affective orientation (strongest effect: r = −.62), more frequent negative affective language, and more extreme negative expression, with weaker evidence for reduced positive language. Measures of positive extremes, affective expressiveness, and verbosity showed no significant associations.Identity diffusion in adolescents is thus associated with a distinctive affective language profile, detectable from clinical interview transcripts using sentiment analysis. The results are consistent with psychodynamic accounts of splitting and affective dysregulation, and support the potential of automated language analysis as a reproducible, scalable complement to clinical assessment.