Establishment Of A List Of Suicide Related Speech Emotion Words Of Psychological Hotline Callers And Its Validities And Reliabilities Test

Objective: To establish an emotional word list related to suicide and test reliability and validity of the list in suicide-related speech emotion recognition task.Methods: The emotional word list has been established through nomination and discussion among 10 professionals on suicide prevention.The recording of Beijing Psychological Assistance Hotline was used for reliability and validity test.Five recordings in the hotline were included for rater reliability test.Among them,three recordings were used for practice and discussion by seven researchers,and the remaining two recordings were labeled by the researchers using the emotional word list.The scores of suicidal risk assessment scale and occurrence of suicide or suicide attempts during 12-month follow-up among the 67 hotline callers whose tape-recorded calls were included in this study,were used as golden-standard to test the criterion validity of the list.For each of the other 67 tape-recordings,3 trained professionals independently labelled emotional characteristics using the emotional word list.Professionals or postgraduate students in psychiatry or psychology were recruited,their evaluation to the list were used to test the construct validity of the list.Results: The emotional words list consists of 11 emotion words which were highly associated with suicidal behaviors.The Fleiss’ Kappa value of 0.42 indicated good inter-rater reliability of the list.In criterion validity,54 recordings had suicide risk scores.Spearman correlation analysis was used to analyze the correlation between suicide risk scores and the number of emotional labels in 54 recordings.Results show that the despair,Sadness,Psychological distress,helplessness,numbness and grievance were positively correlated with the score of suicide risk.There were 48 callers who completed the 12-month follow-up.Comparing the number of emotional labels of callers with and without suicide behavior,it was found that callers with suicide behavior had significantly higher numbness than callers without suicide behavior during the follow-up period.A total of 201 psychiatric or psychological professionals were recruited.The results of exploratory factor analysis showed that 11 emotional words belonged to a factor,the results support one-factor model of the emotional word list.Conclusion: The emotional words list established in this study had acceptable psychometric performance in identifying suicide-related emotional characteristics of speech materials of hotline for suicide prevention.The list could also be widely used for speech emotion recognition in future studies on suicide prevention.