Abstract
Language models can score psychiatric questionnaires from speech, but agreement with self-report may reflect the questionnaire rather than the person. We introduce psychometric representational similarity analysis, a framework for comparing the structure of speech-derived scores, self-report, item wording and theory, and implement it alongside person-level construct scoring in COMPASS 2.0. We show how similarly worded items induce covariance without psychological signal. In pre-registered discovery and confirmation analyses of clinical interviews from 275 participants, language-derived symptom geometry resembled wording more than self-report, with no structure beyond wording detected by the registered tests. Geometric agreement with self-report survived assigning participants someone else's answers, whereas person-paired scores captured distress more than specific symptoms. Complementary analyses examined counselling quality and wording structure across 34 instruments and the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework. These findings distinguish agreement about psychological structure from evidence that language-derived assessments track individual people.
Keywords
Subject
Publication details
- Journal
- Not available
- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Lin, B. (2026). COMPASS 2.0: psychometric representational similarity analysis distinguishes symptom structure from personal signal. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/compass-2-0-psychometric-representational-similarity-analysis-distinguishes-symptom-structure-from-personal-signal
MLA 9
Lin, Baihan. "COMPASS 2.0: psychometric representational similarity analysis distinguishes symptom structure from personal signal." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/compass-2-0-psychometric-representational-similarity-analysis-distinguishes-symptom-structure-from-personal-signal.
Chicago (author–date)
Lin, Baihan. 2026. "COMPASS 2.0: psychometric representational similarity analysis distinguishes symptom structure from personal signal." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/compass-2-0-psychometric-representational-similarity-analysis-distinguishes-symptom-structure-from-personal-signal.
Harvard
Lin, B. (2026) 'COMPASS 2.0: psychometric representational similarity analysis distinguishes symptom structure from personal signal', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/compass-2-0-psychometric-representational-similarity-analysis-distinguishes-symptom-structure-from-personal-signal.
Vancouver
Lin B. COMPASS 2.0: psychometric representational similarity analysis distinguishes symptom structure from personal signal. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/compass-2-0-psychometric-representational-similarity-analysis-distinguishes-symptom-structure-from-personal-signal
IEEE
B. Lin, "COMPASS 2.0: psychometric representational similarity analysis distinguishes symptom structure from personal signal," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/compass-2-0-psychometric-representational-similarity-analysis-distinguishes-symptom-structure-from-personal-signal.