Language Speaks Louder Than Performance: Linguistic Indicators of Cognitive Processing Across Common Threat Scenarios

Psychological theories suggest that threat universally suppresses analytical reasoning by triggering intuitive, emotionally driven responses. We conducted a large‐scale experiment ( N = 2708) to compare the effects of 11 threat manipulations on cognitive performance and linguistic expression. Using behavioral tasks and linguistic analysis, we found threats did not significantly impair cognitive performance; they did affect linguistic indicators of analytical thinking, emotional expression, and social orientation. For example, exposure to the climate change scenario increased analytical language use, whereas exposure to pathogen‐related threats decreased it. Network analyses of participants' written responses revealed distinct clusters of cognitive, affective, motivational, and social language, with affiliative terms emerging as central across most conditions. This suggests linguistic markers may capture variations in cognitive framing under stress that are not detectable in performance tasks. These findings challenge one‐size‐fits‐all models of threat and emphasize the importance of understanding how people reason and regulate their emotions across common threat scenarios.