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Mirroring Minds: Asymmetric Linguistic Accommodation and Diagnostic Identity in ADHD and Autism Reddit Communities

Paper · 2026 · Saad Mankarious, Nour Zeid, Iyad Ait Hou et al.

Summary

The paper looks at how two neurodivergent Reddit communities, r/ADHD and r/autism, change their language when members post in each other's subreddits. Most prior mental-health NLP work studies individual users. This study instead takes an intergroup view based on Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT). The authors take ADHD and autism users from the Mindset dataset, whose labels come from self-reported diagnoses, and re-download their full posting histories. They split posts by the author's diagnosis and the subreddit where the post appeared. Each post is scored with LIWC-22, and scores are averaged per user before statistical comparison.

Each community has its own linguistic profile. When users post in the other subreddit, that profile moves toward the host community's style, in a mirror-image, bidirectional way with medium effect sizes. As a result, classifiers that separate ADHD from autism users on home-community posts fail on the same users' cross-community posts. This suggests such models partly learn community norms rather than the conditions themselves. Changes in style around public diagnosis disclosure were small and sometimes ran opposite to the accommodation shifts.

Key points

  • Data and design: the Mindset corpus (ADHD and autism groups) was refetched via the arctic_shift API. Posts were split into four subsets: ADHD-in-ADHD, ADHD-in-Autism, Autism-in-Autism and Autism-in-ADHD. No user belongs to both diagnostic groups.
  • Features and statistics:
    • 115 LIWC-22 categories, aggregated per user to avoid pseudoreplication.
    • Group comparisons with Welch's t-test and Cohen's d.
    • Benjamini–Hochberg FDR correction at q = 0.05.
  • Classifier vulnerability: logistic regression, linear SVC and random forest reach 66–68% accuracy on in-group posts. On cross-community posts they drop to 36–37%, a fall of about 30 points to below chance.
  • Asymmetry: ADHD users cross-post about 4× more often and score higher on AUTHENTIC. The autism community shows higher CLOUT and firmer boundaries. The authors interpret this through an individualism/collectivism "neuro-intercultural" lens.
  • Limitations:
    • Topic and style effects are not fully separated.
    • Diagnoses are self-reported.
    • There is no neurotypical control group.
    • Only one platform is studied, and LIWC features are purely lexical.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓George Washington UniversityWashington · United States51 works · 8,148 citations🎓Texas A&M UniversityCollege Station · United States29 works · 1,871 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 7The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksSocial Psychology · 330 worksHuman-Computer Interaction · 160 works

Cite

Cite as Saad Mankarious, Nour Zeid, Iyad Ait Hou, Rebecca Hwa and Ayah Zirikly. 2026. Mirroring Minds: Asymmetric Linguistic Accommodation and Diagnostic Identity in ADHD and Autism Reddit Communities. Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2026).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.clpsych-1.23

@inproceedings{mankarious2026mirroring,
  title = {{Mirroring Minds: Asymmetric Linguistic Accommodation and Diagnostic Identity in ADHD and Autism Reddit Communities}},
  author = {Saad Mankarious, Nour Zeid, Iyad Ait Hou, Rebecca Hwa and Ayah Zirikly},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2026)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.clpsych-1.23},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.clpsych-1.23}
}

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