The Shape of a Final Message: An Emotional Landscape in the Language of Suicide

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Abstract The emotional content of suicide notes is typically examined using categorical coding, where each labeled passage is treated in isolation from its surrounding language. In contrast, di-mensional models of psychopathology propose that affective content varies along continuous gradients. We evaluated this proposition directly. Excerpts from 884 annotated suicide notes were embedded in a semantic space defined solely by their linguistic properties, and we investigated whether human-assigned emotion labels changed smoothly across this space. They did: affective tone showed clear spatial autocorrelation (Moran’s I = 0.18, z = 19.68, p < 0.001), an effect that replicated across three different encoders and remained after removing all within-note dependencies. Emotions occupied recognizable yet overlapping re-gions rather than forming distinct clusters and varied substantially in how tightly they were concentrated: love and hopelessness appeared with similar frequency, but love was far more localized ( z = 15.7 versus 10.8). Among all emotions, hopelessness was the most linguis-tically diffuse, implying that a single categorical label is capturing multiple, qualitatively different manifestations of suicidal distress.

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