Currently submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jan 6, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 7, 2026 - Mar 4, 2026
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A Text Mining Approach to Measure Consistency in Self-Reported Situational Causes for Irritability
ABSTRACT
Background:
Irritability, a transdiagnostic symptom linked to severe functional impairment and suicide risk, comprises of tonic irritability (i.e., chronic irritable mood) and phasic irritability (i.e., episodic anger outbursts). However, the consistency in situational triggers for irritability (i.e., irritability-related stressors) has not been thoroughly studied.
Objective:
This study uses text mining to create a metric for consistency in irritability-related stressors and examines its association with daily irritability.
Methods:
Ninety-seven participants (47% female; age: M = 38.85, SD = 10.62; 16% ethno-racial minority) with self-reported depression completed a baseline survey and up to 18 days of daily diaries. We computed the semantic similarity between daily text descriptions of irritability-related stressors to estimate within-person consistency across days. We applied linear regression, mixed-effects linear model, and permutation regression to test the metric’s fairness, relations to daily tonic and phasic irritability separately, and associations with the intraindividual covariance between tonic and phasic irritability.
Results:
The constructed metric showed no demographic differences. The metric was negatively associated with baseline phasic irritability (β = 0.23, p <0.001) and daily phasic irritability (β = -0.24, p < 0.001). Higher value in the metric was linked to greater covariance between tonic and phasic irritability (β = 0.23, p < 0.001).
Conclusions:
The findings indicated that the irritability-related stressors consistency index serves as a fair and unbiased measurement tool for assessing the consistency of self-reported situational causes of irritability. Furthermore, diverse situational causes are indicative of vulnerability to daily phasic irritability. When situational causes are reported to be consistent, individuals tend to experience co-occurring tonic and phasic irritability.
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