Clinical Phenomena

7 articles

Speech is a window into cognition, and clinical research has spent a century building vocabulary for what it sees there: derailment, tangentiality, poverty of speech, perseveration, pressure of speech. These articles are about recognizing those phenomena in real transcripts—not the textbook one-liner, but the boundary cases that make two trained raters disagree.

Each phenomenon gets the same treatment: what the construct means, how the major assessment scales (TLC, PANSS, BPRS) operationalize it, worked examples in synthetic transcript text, and the coding decisions that separate a defensible annotation from a guess. Because the hard part is never the prototypical case—it is deciding where circumstantiality ends and tangentiality begins, or whether a repeated phrase is perseveration or emphasis.

This is the domain content that annotation projects in computational psychiatry, speech-language pathology, and psychotherapy research are built on. It pairs naturally with the Reliability & Agreement section: a construct you cannot annotate consistently is a construct you cannot study.

On the left six plain emotion-category chips; on the right an eight-spoke radial wheel with intensity gradients and dyad links, one spoke accented in coral, with a small downward marker between them—contrasting Ekman's six discrete emotions with Plutchik's wheel.

Clinical Phenomena

Ekman vs Plutchik: Which Emotion Model to Label With?

Ekman vs Plutchik for annotation: 6 discrete emotions or 8 with intensities and dyads, and why more categories lower agreement. See which to pick.

Jul 19, 2026Read

$A straight line of reasoning refracted through a faceted prism and emerging bent, illustrating how cognitive distortions bias an appraisal.$ Clinical Phenomena

Cognitive Distortions List: 10 CBT Patterns, Coded

The cognitive distortions list, explained: all 10 CBT thinking errors with definitions and examples, where the list came from, and why they resist coding.

Jul 15, 2026Read

Six minimal geometric face-shapes in a row, illustrating Ekman's six basic emotions as a label set.

Clinical Phenomena

Ekman's Basic Emotions: The Six, and How to Label Them

Ekman's basic emotions are six universal states: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise. See why they anchor most emotion datasets.

Jul 15, 2026Read

An abstract eight-petal radial wheel with graded tones, illustrating Plutchik's eight primary emotions and their intensities.

Clinical Phenomena

Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions: 8 Primaries, Explained

Plutchik's wheel of emotions maps eight primaries into four opposing pairs, with intensity rings and dyads. See how to label emotion in text.

Jul 15, 2026Read

A sparse speech waveform on a wide pale field, mostly flat silence with a few short bracketed segments, illustrating poverty of speech as a measured absence.

Clinical Phenomena

Poverty of Speech and Alogia: Coding the SANS Subscale

Poverty of speech is the core of alogia. See the four SANS alogia items, how they differ from poverty of content, and how to code each from a transcript.

Jul 15, 2026Read

A line of connected nodes representing a train of thought derailing onto an oblique branch, illustrating positive formal thought disorder.

Clinical Phenomena

Positive Formal Thought Disorder: The SAPS Subscale

Positive formal thought disorder is disorganized speech you can see. Meet the SAPS FTD items, how they differ from the TLC and SANS, and how to code them.

Jul 15, 2026Read

A speech thread that visibly derails onto a tangent, illustrating disordered thought, language, and communication.

Clinical Phenomena

The Thought Language and Communication Scale, Explained

The Thought Language and Communication scale (TLC) is Andreasen's glossary of disordered speech. See the items, the reliability data, and how to code them.

Jul 15, 2026Read