Abstract Objectives This study aimed to: (1) examine whether posts from a dissociation Reddit community (i.e., subreddit) are characterized by reduced use of agentive language compared to posts from other psychopathology subreddits; (2) assess whether posts from the Maladaptive Daydreaming (MD) subreddit, a condition with dissociative characteristics, also show reduced agency relative to other psychopathologies, though to a lesser extent than dissociation; and (3) compare these groups with posts from unrelated, random online subreddits.
Methods We collected 10,000 posts from the dissociation subreddit as well as an overall number of 10,000 posts from the depression, anxiety, and social anxiety subreddits (composing a general psychopathology group), 10,000 posts from the MD subreddit, and 100 messages from 100 randomly selected subreddits (sampled from a list of 1000 popular subreddits. Using the ‘spaCyr’ package we quantified passive language as the frequency of passive voice auxiliary verbs in each post.
Results A negative binomial generalized linear model revealed that posts from the dissociation group used 12% more passive voice than MD posts (IRR = 1.12, p < 0.001) and 10% more than general psychopathology posts (IRR = 1.10, p < 0.001). No significant difference was found between MD and general psychopathology groups (IRR = 0.98, p = 0.250). All psychopathology groups showed less passive language than the control group, with reductions of 15% in dissociation (IRR = 0.85, p < 0.001), 24% in MD (IRR = 0.76, p < 0.001), and 23% in general psychopathology (IRR = 0.77, p < 0.001).
Conclusions Reduced agentive language is distinctively associated with dissociation, as seen in subreddit posts. These findings suggest that a diminished sense of agency is uniquely related to dissociation, differentiating it from MD and other psychopathologies.
