As we started looking more closely at the language of the suicidal and nonsuicidal poets, something caught our eyes. The suicidal poets, in using I-related pronouns, seemed to be psychologically close to their sadness and misery in ways that the nonsuicidal poets were not.
For example, consider the first line of Sylvia Plath’s well-known poem “Mad Girl’s Lovesong” where she is mourning the loss of love: “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.)”
Compare her sadness with the words of the well-respected poet Denise Levertov in the first line of her poem, “The Ache of Marriage”: “The ache of marriage: thigh and tongue, beloved, are heavy with it, it throbs in the teeth.”
Although both poems deal with a similar topic, Plath’s use of I suggests that she is embracing her loss. Levertov, on the other hand, seems to be holding her pain away at arm’s length—almost as if she is looking at it from a more distant (and safer) third-person perspective. Indeed, as one reads the collected works of these two authors, it is apparent how the two differ in owning or embracing their feelings of loss, alienation, and depression. Plath may be the more popular poet for this reason. With the tool of first-person singular pronouns, she takes us closer to the edge so that we can get a feeling of her personal despair.
ARROGANCE, LOSS, AND DEPRESSION: THE CASE OF MAYOR GIULIANI AND KING LEAR
Closely linked to sadness and depression are the feelings of loss that come from failure or rejection. In the year 2000, a front-page article in the New York Times reported on some apparent personality changes that members of the press were witnessing in Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor of New York City at the time. In my experience, people’s personalities don’t change very often and the Times piece intrigued me enough to start digging a little deeper.
During his eight years as mayor, Rudolph Giuliani was variously referred to in the media as an insensitive bully, a man seething with anger and self-righteousness as well as someone with a reservoir of warmth, charm, and compassion. Such contradictory assessments were often made by the same people as Giuliani changed over his term. One thing that the majority of New Yorkers agreed on was that he was an effective mayor. He helped rescue the city financially, reduced crime, and restored tourism. Because of his mayoral success, he had begun a campaign for the 2000 U.S. Senate seat against Hillary Clinton.
In late spring of 2000, Giuliani’s life turned upside down within a two-week period: He was diagnosed with prostate cancer, withdrew from the senate race against Hillary Clinton, separated from his wife on national television (before telling his wife), and, a few days later, acknowledged his “special friendship” with Judith Nathan, whom he later married. By mid-May, he was living in a friend’s apartment while undergoing treatment for his cancer. By early June, friends, acquaintances, old enemies, and members of the press all noticed that Giuliani seemed more genuine, humble, and warm.
One of the most reliable predictors of depression is experiencing traumatic life events. In fact, the more traumatic upheavals people experience at any given time, the higher the probability of depression and illness. Could we see changes in Giuliani’s personality by looking at his language? Fortunately, the New York City mayor had frequent press conferences that we were able to analyze. Specifically, we wanted to know if his function words had changed over the course of his emotional upheavals compared to earlier in his term.
Compared to his first years as mayor, Giuliani demonstrated a dramatic increase in his use of I-words, a drop in big words, and an increase in his use of both positive and negative emotion words. He also shifted away from first-person plural pronouns, or we-words. Recall from earlier chapters, we-words are used frequently when people are arrogant, emotionally distant, and high in status. Males especially use we in a distancing or royal form: “We need to analyze that data” or “We aren’t going to put up with higher taxes.” In Giuliani’s case, his language suggested an interesting personality switch from cold and distanced to someone who was more warm and immediate.
When the first phase of the Giuliani project was complete, there was something about the results that seemed eerily familiar. And then it hit me: Shakespeare’s King Lear. In the play, King Lear starts off as an arrogant ruler who demands that his daughters publicly declare their love and admiration for him. His favorite daughter, Cordelia, refuses and ultimately leaves England and marries the king of France. Wars, fights, recriminations, and misery follow. (Note: this is the CliffsNotes version of the play.) In the final act, the mortally wounded King Lear confronts the corpse of his beloved daughter. He is transformed. After facing the trauma of his losses, his personality exudes warmth and humanity. See the connection with Giuliani? Read Shakespeare’s first and last speeches by Lear:
Act 1, Scene 1. King Lear speaks:
Know we have divided in three our kingdom; and it is our fast intent to shake all cares and business from our age, conferring them on younger strengths while we unburdened crawl toward death. Our son of Cornwall, and you, our no less loving son of Albany, we have this hour a constant will to publish our daughters’ several dowers, that future strife may be prevented now … Tell me, my daughters (since now we will divest us both of rule, interest of territory, cares of state), which of you shall we say does love us most? That we our largest bounty may extend where nature does with merit challenge.
Act 5, Scene 3. King Lear’s final lines:
Oh, you are men of stone. Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so that heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone forever! I know when one is dead, and when one lives. She is dead as earth … A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all! I might have saved her; now she’s gone for ever! Cordelia! Stay a little. What is it that you say? Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low … I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion. I would have made them skip. I am old now, and these same crosses spoil me. Who are you? My eyes are not of the best. I’ll tell you straight … Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir. Do you see this? Look on her!
The analyses of these two speeches make for a fascinating parallel with the changes seen with Mayor Giuliani. In fact, the relative usage of pronouns and big words by Giuliani and Lear in their early arrogant periods compared with their post-trauma warm-and-honest periods is almost disconcerting. During the arrogant periods, both Lear and Giuliani used low rates of I-words and emotion words and, at the same time, high rates of we-words and big words. These patterns were reversed for both when faced with life-changing (and, in Lear’s case, life-ending) personal upheavals. Life imitates art and science is here to record it.
The Giuliani story unfolded in another interesting and important way after his personal crisis in 2000. A little over a year after his personal crises, Giuliani was serving his last months as mayor when the September 11 attacks brought down the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center, killing almost three thousand people. By all accounts, Giuliani emerged as a powerful and compassionate leader of New York and the United States.
Giuliani’s news conferences in the first weeks after the attacks were marked by genuine warmth and grace. Analysis of his language revealed a new pattern of word use. His use of I-words was moderately high (3 percent) as was his use of we-words (3.2 percent). His use of we-words, however, stood out in another way. Early in his administration, his we-word usage was often vague, referring to society at large. After the attacks, his we-words were much more targeted and personal, referring to the residents of New York City or particular groups in government.
THE LANGUAGE OF KING LEAR AND MAYOR GIULIANI: PERCENTAGES OF TOTAL WORDS
LEAR
ACT 1
GIULIANI
FIRST YEARS
LEAR LAST
ACT
GIULIANI
CRISIS
I, me, my
2.0
2.1
7.4
7.0
We, us, our
12.0
2.5
0
1.0
Big words
18.9
17.0
7.4
12.5
Note: The Shakespeare analyses are of the first and last speeches by King Lear; the Giuliani data are based on press conferences during the first four years of Giuliani’s administration and during the two months immediately following his announcement of his prostate cancer. Numbers are percentage of total words within speeches (for Lear) and within press conferences (for Giuliani).
The Giuliani project complements the suicidal poet results in demonstrating the links between emotional states and function words, particularly pronouns. Emotions both reflect and affect our social connections with others. Pronouns, by their very nature, track the relationships between speakers and those they are communicating with. Pronouns and other stealth function words serve as subtle emotion detectors that most of us never consciously appreciate.
HOW TRAUMAS UNFOLD: USING WORDS AS WINDOWS
There are at least two ways people deal with emotional pain—acknowledging it and avoiding it. The suicidal poets, the imaginary king, and the real mayor all acknowledged their pain and loss. Socially, their elevated I-word usage made them appear more introspective and vulnerable. Looking inwardly can intensify the pain, motivate the person to understand and come to terms with it, and alert others about his or her emotional distress.
Another common strategy people adopt in dealing with pain is to avoid it or, in some way, distance themselves from it. Recall Denise Levertov’s poem “The Ache of Marriage,” where she analyzed the experience in a less personal, more distant way. Other avoidance strategies include trying to put the unwanted emotional experience out of mind altogether. In fact, distancing oneself from pain can be a very effective way to regulate emotions, especially in the short run. If I receive bad news about the death of my dog just prior to a business meeting, it behooves me to ignore my feelings and to continue the meeting as though nothing has happened even though part of me wants to collapse onto the floor and wail.
There appears to be an art form to avoiding emotional pain in the short run. In a series of brilliant laboratory studies, Dan Wegner and his colleagues have shown that people can’t just stop thinking about an emotional event. Rather, they need to start paying attention to something else. If something terrible happens before that meeting, Wegner would advise you to think about the meeting itself and not say to yourself “Don’t think about the dog, don’t think about the dog.”
When do people naturally use avoidance versus acknowledgment strategies in dealing with traumatic experiences? Only recently have scientists been able to track the ways people react to traumas as they unfold. Through a mix of technological innovations, it is becoming clear that most people tend to adopt both avoidance and acknowledgment strategies in the short run when dealing with upheavals.
THE SHOCK OF A TRAUMA IN THE FIRST HOURS
A few years ago my family and I were staying at the house of my friend Hector over the holidays. He asked me to listen to his voice messages and to contact him if there was an emergency. Several days into our stay, he received a message from a male who spoke in a quiet and flat tone:
Hector, it’s Nolan. Just calling to say that Marguerite died last night. She took a turn for the worse a couple of days ago. Thanks for calling last week. Really appreciate it. There will be a memorial service on Monday. Will try to call you later. Stay in touch. Take care. Bye.
I didn’t know Nolan or Marguerite nor did I know their relationship. But it was obvious that Nolan was completely crushed. As I listened to the message again, I tried to figure out why I knew that he was so devastated. He never said he was sad or in pain. He didn’t cry and his voice didn’t waver. The starkness of his language, however, was something I was not used to.
As a connoisseur of pronouns, I was struck that Nolan never used I, me, or my in his message. In fact, in the years since hearing Nolan’s voice message, I have heard at least three others where friends called to tell me about the death of someone close. And, like Nolan, they rarely used the word I.
More recently, I cataloged the first lines of blog posts from people who wrote about the death of a parent, spouse, or sibling that had occurred within the same day of their posting. Comparing their language with another post they made just prior to the death, the same pattern emerged. In the peak hours of suffering, most people used relatively few I-words and a low rate of negative emotion words. Their language was relatively simple, using smaller words, shorter sentences, and fewer cognitive words.
Immediately after a traumatic loss, people are often disoriented, numb, and in excruciating pain. As a way to reduce the pain, they regulate their attention away from their bodies. Intense grief causes people to pay less attention to themselves and their emotions. Instead, they focus more on the person who has died, their family, and the details of the death.
TRACKING THE EMOTIONS OF A COUNTRY: BLOGS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
It makes sense that people psychologically distance themselves from a personal trauma in the minutes or hours after hearing emotionally overwhelming news. Does this happen on a broader scale when large groups of people face a traumatic experience? In the United States, when people heard the news of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, or the September 11 attacks, they recalled where they were and what they were doing for the rest of their lives. Do people emotionally distance themselves when learning of a culturally shared trauma in the same ways we have seen with intensely personal events?
Unlike earlier cultural upheavals, the 9/11 attacks occurred when a sizable group of people were starting to blog regularly. An undergraduate on my research team with considerable computer expertise, Michael Cohn, dropped by my office a couple of weeks after the attacks and proposed analyzing the text of thousands of blogs to track how people changed in their writing and thinking from before the attack to the weeks and months afterward.
Working with a popular blog site at the time, LiveJournal.com, Michael, Matthias Mehl, and I saved the postings of over a thousand people who blogged at least three or four times per week in the two months before and after 9/11. We selected blogs from people who lived in the United States and who represented a wide range of ages. By all accounts, the bloggers were regular people who simply liked to blog about a broad array of topics. Analyses of over seventy thousand blog entries revealed startling changes in pronoun and emotion word use from before to during to after the attacks.
Consistent with the telephone messages and blog entries soon after a death, online bloggers immediately dropped in their use of I-words as soon as they learned of the September 11 attacks. In the top graph on the next page, you can see that use of I-words dropped substantially from the baseline level of 6.2 percent. From a statistical perspective, this was a jaw-dropping, breathtaking change.
Hold on to your seats; there’s more. Just as I-words dropped, use of first-person plural we-words jumped at an even higher rate. As you can see on the bottom graph, use of we-words almost doubled from before to after the attacks. Recall from earlier chapters that there are different types of we-words. The types of we-words people used were a mix of we meaning Americans and we referring to family.
Here are two examples.
A twenty-five-year-old female, whose previous blog entries described her attraction to another man and the awkwardness of running into an old boyfriend, was deeply shaken by 9/11:
Note: Graphs reflect percentage of I-words (top) and we-words (bottom) within daily blog entries of 1,084 bloggers in the two months surrounding September 11, 2001.
I watched the buildings collapse, I cried as the WTC [World Trade Center] came tumbling down … My sadness was replaced with anger … and fear. The idea that our home is no longer safe. I think we are as angry for loss of safety … as we are for the lives that were lost.
This man’s earlier blogs were generally devoted to philosophical and cultural topics.
The day before the attacks, he wrote at length about Ayn Rand and libertarianism. The next day he became the epitome of social responsibility:
What can we do to help? Blood banks are probably VERY crowded right now, and may be for several days. Don’t let that stop you. YOU are needed. YOU can help.
Approximately 92 percent of the blog entries mentioned the attacks in the first twenty-four hours after the collapse of the buildings. In a powerful way, it forced people to embrace others in their family, community, and nation.
Analysis of people’s use of emotion words in the blogs bolstered the pronoun findings. After relatively brief drops in positive emotions and increases in negative emotions, people’s use of emotions returned to normal. And, in fact, they tended to express more positive emotions than they did before the attacks occurred. To capture these effects, our computer counted the percentage of words that reflected positive emotion (e.g., love, happy, gift) as well as negative emotion words (hate, cry, worry). As you can see in the next figure, during the two months prior to the attacks, people generally used far more positive than negative emotion words. People are basically quite positive in the ways they communicate with each other.
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us Page 12