The Associations between Self-Deception, Depressive Mood, and Attachment Dimensions with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count

This study aims to examine the relationships between depressive mood, self-deception, and attachment dimensions by using language style of individuals. Participants (N=41) were asked complete an implicit association task, Beck depression scale, experiences in close relation scale. Besides, they were also asked to write down a passage, in which they should have intentionally produced an obvious lie for themselves. Finally, they were asked to report their memory related to the school life. Following previous studies on language style of lying linguistic components were excluded using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Analyses yielded that there was no significant differences in language style for both actual memory notes and intentionally lying conditions for people with low depressive mood (e.g., t-first-person singular (38)=.69, ns). However, there were significant differences between actual memory notes and lying conditions for participants with high depressive mood (e.g., t-first-person plural (38)=3.69, p<.01), signifying that people with depressive mood did not show lying tendency in their actual memory notes, however, this was not the case for people with lower levels of depressive moods. Results of this study confirmed the idea that depressive mood may shadow defence mechanisms like self-deception and people with higher levels of depressive mood would perform lower levels of self-deception. This tendency could also be observed at linguistic dimensions they produced.