Linguistic markers of interpretation bias in nontrauma narratives and associations with PTSD among sexual minority cisgender women, transgender men and women, and gender diverse people.

OBJECTIVE: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is characterized by negative appraisals, heightened threat sensitivity, and interpretation biases that shape how individuals perceive and describe their experiences, including in everyday language. Sexual minority cisgender women, transgender men and women, and gender diverse people (SMW/TGD) experience disproportionately high rates of trauma, stigma related to gender and sexual identity, and PTSD, yet linguistic markers of interpretation bias have rarely been examined in this population. This study investigated whether PTSD symptom severity predicted emotional language during neutral autobiographical expressive writing among trauma-exposed SMW/TGD adults. METHOD: Participants (N = 48) assigned to the neutral control condition of a 5-day expressive writing study completed baseline PTSD assessments and wrote daily 15-20-minute narratives describing the prior day's events. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count-22 quantified the percentage of negative, positive, and overall emotion words across narratives. RESULTS: Multilevel models indicated that baseline PTSD severity predicted greater use of negative emotion words across writing days despite participants having been instructed to write objectively. PTSD severity was unrelated to positive emotion word use or overall emotion words. Intraclass correlations indicated substantial within-person fluctuation in emotional expression across days, along with moderate daily stability between persons. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that negative emotional language in neutral narratives may serve as an implicit linguistic marker of PTSD-related interpretation bias among SMW/TGD individuals. Results highlight the potential utility of neutral expressive writing as a nontrauma-eliciting context for identifying cognitive-affective processes relevant to PTSD and may help to inform tailored trauma-focused interventions for SMW/TGD people. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).