Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Tibor Kovacs, Dr Stuart WatsonORCiD, Dr Nick Riches, Maggie Douglas, Professor Douglas Turkington
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.Background: The role of psychological trauma in psychotic disorders is well documented, but there is a lack of research about how traumatic experiences are reflected in the speech of patients experiencing psychosis. We present an explorative study examining associations between trauma history in patients diagnosed with psychosis, linguistic variables and clinical symptoms. Methods: We analysed data of 19 participants diagnosed with schizophrenia: symptoms measured via a semi-structured interview, trauma history reported in retrospective questionnaires and linguistic analysis of two speech samples per participant–an emotionally neutral, less structured and a more emotionally charged, semi-structured conversation. We performed correlation analyses between trauma, language markers and symptoms, hypothesis testing (LASSO, linear regression) and network analysis. Results: Our findings show that trauma (especially close interpersonal trauma) in psychosis is associated with lower levels of cognitive processing, more disfluent speech, higher verbal output, and lower expression of difficult emotions. Linguistic variables showed good predictive value of trauma history, and network analysis displayed clinically meaningful relations between variables. Discussion: Our results are consistent with theories of fragmentation, deficit of cognitive processing, and somatisation in post-traumatic states, supporting the existence of a trauma-related pathophysiological pathway in psychotic disorders, and highlighting the importance of interpersonal trauma.
Author(s): Kovacs TZ, Watson S, Riches N, Douglas M, Turkington D
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Psychosis
Year: 2025
Pages: epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 04/11/2025
Acceptance date: 18/08/2025
Date deposited: 24/11/2025
ISSN (print): 1752-2439
ISSN (electronic): 1752-2447
Publisher: Routledge
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/17522439.2025.2573477
DOI: 10.1080/17522439.2025.2573477
Data Access Statement: Anonymised source material, analysis plan and details of correlation testing available on Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/82kzn/?view_only=0948df0b33fe4dd3a54e8bdf0c32b935
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
