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Linguistic Distancing on Social Media: Indicators of Emotion Regulation Across Age Groups

Paper · 2026 · Daniela Teodorescu, Saif M. Mohammad and Alona Fyshe

Summary

Emotion regulation is closely tied to well-being, and one healthy regulation strategy is stepping back psychologically from events. This kind of distancing can show up in language, for example as fewer first-person pronouns or less present-tense phrasing. Earlier studies of linguistic distancing focused on children, adolescents and young adults, often using therapy transcripts or lab reappraisal tasks. This paper asks how distancing differs across adulthood in everyday online writing. The authors adapt a previously proposed linguistic distancing metric built from four parts: distance from other people, distance in time, use of passive constructions, and abstract language. They apply it to the AgeCorpus, which contains Reddit and X (TUSC) posts whose authors' ages were identified through regex-matched self-declarations. Posts are grouped into seven age bands, from 13–19 up to 70–79, and compared using (Welch's) ANOVA. Across subsets, older age groups show proportionally more distancing. This is consistent with psychology findings that well-being improves later in life, although the effect sizes are small. The study offers cross-sectional benchmarks for tracking emotion regulation through text and could help inform health interventions.

Key points

  • Data: the AgeCorpus has three subsets.
    • Reddit: about 33M posts.
    • TUSC-City: about 1.9M posts.
    • TUSC-Country: about 12K posts.
    • Author ages come from regex patterns such as statements of age or birth year/date.
  • Metric: the linguistic distancing score combines temporal distance, social distance, passive voice and abstractness.
  • Statistical results: ANOVA found significant age-group differences in all subsets (p<.001).
    • Reddit: F=17703.63, ω²≈0.003.
    • TUSC-City: F=2830.26, ω²≈0.009.
    • TUSC-Country: F=29.66, ω²≈0.015.
    • Welch's ANOVA was used for Reddit and TUSC-City because Levene's test showed unequal variances.
  • TUSC-Country trends: distancing increases with age, and all components rise in similar ways, with social distancing showing the steepest slope.
  • Code: released publicly at github.com/dteodore/Age — Linguistic_Distancing.

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

🏛️National Research Council CanadaOttawa · Canada59 works · 21,677 citations🎓University of AlbertaEdmonton · Canada44 works · 3,236 citations🔬Alberta Machine Intelligence InstituteAlberta · Canada4 works · 231 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Psychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 worksSocial Psychology · 306 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Sentiment & emotion · 972 works

Cite

Cite as Daniela Teodorescu, Saif M. Mohammad and Alona Fyshe. 2026. Linguistic Distancing on Social Media: Indicators of Emotion Regulation Across Age Groups. Proceedings of Computational Affective Science (CAS) @ LREC 2026.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/4fdx983qfms9

@inproceedings{teodorescu2026linguistic,
  title = {{Linguistic Distancing on Social Media: Indicators of Emotion Regulation Across Age Groups}},
  author = {Daniela Teodorescu, Saif M. Mohammad and Alona Fyshe},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of Computational Affective Science (CAS) @ LREC 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/4fdx983qfms9},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4fdx983qfms9}
}

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