3 The website Analyzewords.com is one of several experimental sites that we have been developing. This one was the result of a collaboration among Chris Wilson, a writer at Slate.com; my daughter, Teal Pennebaker, who is a world-class expert on social media; and my longtime computer guru and collaborator Roger Booth. The program analyzes the recent history of anyone’s Twitter posts. Using algorithms we have developed over several years of studying language and personality, we are able to estimate personality profiles by language use. As with all experimental systems, please don’t take the results too seriously.
4 The expressive writing research has a rich history. The basic idea is that if people are asked to write about a traumatic experience for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three or four consecutive days, they later show improvements in physical and mental health compared to others who have been asked to write about superficial topics. To get a better sense of the literature, see my popular book Opening Up as well as articles by Frattaroli (2006) and Pennebaker and Chung (2011). For a list of articles, including many that you can read for free, go to the publications link on my website, www.psy.utexas.edu/pennebaker.
6 For technical information about the development of the LIWC program, see the articles associated with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count on the publications link of my website, www.psy.utexas.edu/pennebaker. The LIWC program is commercially available from www.liwc.net. All profits from the sales of the program are returned to the University of Texas at Austin graduate program in the Department of Psychology.
LIWC is by no means the only text analysis program around. Dozens of different programs are now available. Programs that are particularly useful for people interested in language and psychology include:
Art Graesser’s Coh-Metrix program (cohmetrix.memphis.edu), which calculates the degree to which any groups of texts are readable and coherent.
Rod Hart’s DICTION program (www.dictionsoftware.com) was designed to capture the verbal tone of messages, with particular focus on political speeches.
Tom Landauer’s Latent Semantic Analysis (lsa.colorado.edu) is a suite of programs that allows people to compare the similarity of any texts with other texts.
Mike Scott’s Wordsmith program (www.lexically.net) is a wonderful all-purpose word analysis tool. Although not tailored for advanced psychological analyses, it is a nice word counting system.
10–12 The findings concerning positive emotions, negative emotions, and change in cognitive words were first published in Pennebaker, Mayne, and Francis in 1997. See also Moore and Brody (2009) and Graham, Glaser, Loving, Malarkey, Stowell, and Kiecolt-Glaser (2009).
12–13 The findings on pronouns and changing perspectives were based on an article by Sherlock Campbell and me, published in 2003.
13 One of the more interesting discoveries about expressive writing was reported in an important paper by Youngsuk Kim. In her expressive writing project, bilingual Korean-English and Spanish-English students wrote either in their native language, second language, or both. Youngsuk had all participants wear a portable tape recorder for two days prior to writing and, again, a month after the writing experiment. Compared to people who did not write, participants who wrote about emotional upheavals spent more time with others, talked more, and laughed more. Although the effects were modest, those who wrote in both their native and learned languages tended to benefit the most.
14 Cheryl Hughes and Martha Francis were the first two students to earn doctoral degrees in psychology at Southern Methodist University. The results of Hughes’s attempts to change people’s thinking by influencing their word choice were the basis of her doctoral dissertation in 1994. More recently, Yi-Tai Seih, Cindy Chung, and I asked people to write in either the first person (as if they were simply describing their experience), second person (as if they were talking into a mirror), or third person (as if they were watching themselves in a movie) in their expressive writing. In another study, people were asked to change perspectives from essay to essay. To our surprise, people reported that writing in any perspective was helpful, as was switching perspectives. Our current thinking is that enforced perspective switching is probably good for some people and not others. Not the kind of groundbreaking conclusion we were looking for.
CHAPTER 2: IGNORING THE CONTENT, CELEBRATING THE STYLE
19 The drawing is from the Thematic Apperception Test by Henry A. Murray, Card 12F, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
20 Throughout this book, I include quotations from people who have been in my studies or classes, from text on the Internet, or even from conversations or e-mails from friends or family members. In all cases, all identifying information has been removed or altered.
22 In this book, the terms style, function, and stealth words are used interchangeably. They have many other names as well—junk words, particles, and closed-class words. Linguists tend to disagree about the precise definitions of each of these overlapping terms.
26 The table of function word usage rate is based on analyses from our own data representing language samples from over two thousand conversations, two hundred novels, twenty thousand blogs, and thousands of college student and adult writing samples. For more information, see Pennebaker, Chung, Ireland, Gonzales, and Booth (2007).
28 Political campaigns are wonderful to analyze. Presidential candidates are under the spotlight most every day, whether giving speeches, doing interviews, or simply talking with people on the street. Most of their words are transcribed, making it easy for text analysis experts to track language over the course of the campaign. For some analyses of the 2004 presidential election, see an article by Rich Slatcher, Cindy Chung, Lori Stone, and me. You might also be interested in a site that David Beaver (a linguist from the University of Texas), Art Graesser (cognitive scientist, University of Memphis), Jeff Hancock (communications expert, Cornell), and I have created devoted to political issues, www.wordwatchers.wordpress.com.
29 One of the finest books that discuss the roles of the brain and language is George Miller’s The Science of Words. It is the perfect introduction to the topic for someone without a great deal of background in the area.
31 The story of Phineas Gage is discussed in George Miller’s book. Alexander Luria described Pavlov’s experiences with his dogs in his classic 1973 book.
32–34 Knowing what pronouns and other words refer to within a given communication based on previous shared knowledge is called common ground. It is so central to communication that it has been studied across various fields and has been written about extensively in psycholinguistics by Herb Clark as a theory of common ground, in linguistics by David Beaver as presupposition theory, and in the cognitive sciences by Phil McCarthy and his colleagues as givenness/newness.
35–36 Unfortunately, the cross-language research is not covered in any detail in this book. My former student Nairán Ramírez-Esparza is discovering some remarkable changes in the ways people think as they switch from English to Spanish and vice versa. For example, bilingual speakers feel that they are more outgoing when speaking English and more reserved when speaking Spanish even though their behaviors show the opposite. Working with Cindy Chung and others, Nairán finds that the ways people think about a topic in Spanish are subtly different than the ways they think about it in English. See also work by Kashima and Kashima (1998).
I’m pretty certain that there is a legal requirement for anyone who writes about language to mention the Whorf Hypothesis (or, if you are an anthropologist, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). In line with these regulations, the extreme version of the Whorf Hypothesis is that one’s language and vocabulary dictates one’s perception. So, for example, if I didn’t have a word for the color orange, I wouldn’t be able to perceive the color. Due to an interesting historical movement in psychology and linguistics, the Whorf Hypothesis was roundly dismissed, beginning in the 1960s. New and more interesting versions of the hypothesis keep returning. The research of Nairán, Lera Boroditsky, and many others is now showing that, in
some cases, our language can direct our attention, thinking, and memory.
CHAPTER 3: THE WORDS OF SEX, AGE, AND POWER
40–44 The best summary of our research on sex differences and language is a paper by Matt Newman, Carla Groom, Lori Handelman, and me published in 2008.
41 When people sit in front of a mirror and complete a questionnaire, they use more words like I and me than when the mirror is not present (Davis and Brock, 1975). The nature of self-focus among women has been demonstrated in a series of studies by Barbara Frederickson, Tomi-Ann Roberts, and their colleagues. An interesting take on people’s stereotypes of the ways pronouns work has been shown by Wendi Gardner and her colleagues.
45 Ask any group of people in any culture and they will agree that women talk far more than men. A group of my former students Matthias Mehl, Simine Vazire, Nairán Ramírez, Rich Slatcher, and I ran six experiments in the United States and Mexico where we asked almost four hundred college students to wear a digital tape recorder for two to four days. Everything they said was later transcribed. Surprisingly, across all studies men and women spoke almost exactly the same number of words per day. It is very rare for a study that found absolutely nothing to be published, but the premier journal Science did so in 2007.
46–47 The blog project where we identified authors was conducted by Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Kopel, Jonathan Schler, and me in papers that came out in 2007 and 2009.
49–51 The script paper by Molly Ireland and me is currently under review.
57–60 In addition to the Pennebaker, Groom, Loew, and Dabbs article, see recent work by Jon Maner’s lab as well as by Robert Josephs and his colleagues dealing with testosterone and behavior.
60–63 As we get older, our personalities change. Richard Robins and his colleagues have shown higher self-esteem, John Loehlin and Nick Martin reported increases in emotional stability, and Seider et al. (2009) found greater use of relational pronouns with increasing age. Much of this section is based on an article by Pennebaker and Stone (2003).
67 In the last twenty years, research on social class and physical health has ballooned within the United States. Some excellent articles on the topic include papers by Edith Chen, Karen Matthews, and Thomas Boyce as well as a classic by Nancy Adler and her colleagues.
68–70 There have been virtually no scientifically sound studies tracking natural language use in the home among people of differing social classes. The Hart and Risley study is promising, as is an earlier one by Brandis and Henderson in 1970.
CHAPTER 4: PERSONALITY: FINDING THE PERSON WITHIN
76–82 Most of the initial work on personality and language was the result of a collaboration with Laura King. You can see the actual analyses by reading the Pennebaker and King (1999) paper. A number of people have expanded on this work, especially in how language is related to self-reported personality. Two great projects have been published, one by Francois Mairesse and colleagues and another by Tal Yarkoni. Psychologists Lisa Fast and David Funder, as well as Matthias Mehl, Sam Gosling, and I, have published on word use and personality. See also the creative work of Jon Oberlander, Alastair Gill, and Scott Nowson.
85–90 Cindy Chung’s insight into the Meaning Extraction Method, or MEM, is now being used by labs around the world. It essentially allows researchers to extract themes from text automatically. One of the slickest applications is in pulling out themes written in different languages. For example, we can have the computer analyze thousands of blogs in, say, Finnish. Using the MEM, we can pull out several themes that are popular in Finnish blogs. All we have to do at the end of the project is to find someone who speaks Finnish so that he or she can tell us what we have discovered. The first MEM paper was by Chung and Pennebaker (2008).
97 Some of the criticisms of the TAT mirror those about the Rorschach. For example, the traditional judge-based method of grading essays is subjective. Two people could look at the same writing sample and come away with very different interpretations. Another problem is that when you ask the same person to write a story about the same picture on two occasions, they usually think up a new story to tell, often with different themes. Traditional personality researchers want tests that provide the same results on different occasions. Unfortunately, people are too inventive—they like to create new stories, especially if they have to tell them to the same people.
99 The bin Laden project was published by Pennebaker and Chung (2008). Cindy Chung, Art Graesser, Jeff Hancock, David Beaver, and I have all been immersed in a broader endeavor to learn how leaders change in their rhetoric over time. Hitler, Mao, Castro, as well as less extreme western leaders share changes in language use prior to going to wars, after being attacked, and as their regimes begin to fail.
100 To learn more about other text analysis methods, refer back to the notes for page 6 of the book.
CHAPTER 5: EMOTION DETECTION
106 Many people have argued that emotions affect the ways we think. Barbara Fredrickson, for example, has proposed a broaden-and-build model of positive emotions. Her studies suggest that when people are happy, they are able to pull back, see a broader perspective, and build new ideas. Thomas Borkovec has found that people who are sad or depressed tend to focus their negative feelings on past events, whereas people who are anxious are more worried about future events. Recently, Charles Carver and Eddie Harmon-Jones have provided compelling evidence to suggest that the emotion of anger activates brain areas associated with approach—much like positive emotions. Feelings of sadness or anxiety are linked to brain areas typically associated with avoidance.
108–110 The links between depression and self-focused attention have been independently discovered by several labs over the last thirty years. Walter Weintraub, one of the founding fathers of word analysis, was the first to report it in his 1981 book on verbal behavior. Tom Pysczynski and Jeff Greenberg developed a general theory of self-focus as a cause of depression. In addition to the suicidal poet project by Shannon Stirman and me published in 2001, a paper by Rude, Gortner, and Pennebaker (2004) found depressed college students used more I-words in their essays about their college experience than non-depressed students. See also recent work by Kaufman and Sexton on self-focus among suicidal poets.
110–114 The Giuliani project reference is Pennebaker and Lay (2002).
115 Dan Wegner’s research on thought suppression is ingenious on several levels. Drawing on Tolstoy’s childhood experience, Wegner asked students to not think of a white bear for as little as a minute or two. In doing so, he found that they actually started thinking of bears at high rates. More striking, when students were told that they no longer had to suppress their white bear thoughts, many students reported thinking of white bears at even higher rates. Wegner’s early studies led him to develop a series of important theories about how the mind monitors information.
117–121 A number of investigators are now using blogs and other social media to track the emotional states of large communities of people. For example, Peter Dodds and Christopher Danforth have done this to track happiness, as has Adam Kramer; Bob Kraut, a pioneer of Internet research in psychology, has examined bulletin message boards to track emotional support in online communities; Elizabeth Lyons, Matthias Mehl, and I have analyzed blogs by pro-anorexics to assess their emotional profiles; Markus Wolf, Cindy Chung, and Hans Kordy have analyzed e-mails by psychotherapy patients to their therapists.
122 Over the years, my students and I have studied several large upheavals. Most of this work has attempted to understand how large-scale emotional events unfold over time. To read more about them, see the papers on the Texas A&M bonfire disaster (Gortner and Pennebaker, 2003); the death of Princess Diana (Stone and Pennebaker, 2002); the Loma Prieta earthquake and the Persian Gulf War (Pennebaker and Harber, 1993); and September 11, 2001 (Cohn, Mehl, and Pennebaker, 2004; Mehl and Pennebaker, 2003).
122–123 My colleague Darren Newtson and I traveled around Oregon and Washington for about a month after Mount St. Helens erupted. In t
owns that had experienced a great deal of damage, we randomly interviewed people by going door-to-door and by making random phone calls. One of the more interesting findings was that the more damage that had been done to a community, the more the residents wanted to talk. Those communities that were close to the volcano but that escaped damage were the most suspicious of outsiders and were least likely to agree to be interviewed. See my earlier book Opening Up for a more detailed account.
123 A particularly promising development in social psychology concerns “affective forecasting.” According to its founders, Dan Gilbert, Tim Wilson, and others, people are remarkably bad at guessing how they will react to a future event. In general, people predict that they will be more distressed about a traumatic experience than they actually would be.
124 Societies frequently adopt well-intentioned interventions that don’t work. In addition to CISD, abstinence-only sex education and D.A.R.E. have generally caused more problems than they solved. See Timothy D. Wilson’s book Redirect.
125 Cindy Chung’s dissertation involved tracking 186 bloggers on a blog community devoted to dieting for one year.
126 Are secrets always toxic? Actually, no. In fact, secrets may be bad but telling others can sometimes be worse. For a wonderful summary of the psychology of secrets, see Anita Kelly’s book and articles.
126–127 The story of Laura was first described in my book Opening Up.
127 People have a powerful urge to talk about emotional events. Bernard Rimé and his colleagues find that people across all cultures typically confide in others for virtually all types of emotional events. One of my favorite findings is that if you have an emotional experience and you tell someone about it and you ask your friend to keep it secret, your friend will tell two or three others about it. Even hearing about a secret is an emotional event that the listener needs to share.
CHAPTER 6: LYING WORDS
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us Page 30