It turns out, keeping a journal or diary is therapeutic!
James Pennebaker, chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, is a leader in the computer analysis of texts for a psychological perspective. In his new book, “The Secret Life of Pronouns,” he says that how we use words like “I,” “she,” and “who” reveal parts of our psychology.
His discovery came about back in the ’80’s, when people were asked to write about emotional upheavals, their physical health improved.
In an attempt to better understand the power of writing, we developed a computerized text analysis program to determine how language use might predict later health improvements. In other words, I wanted to find if there was a healthy way to write.
Here were some of his findings:
Pennebaker discovered the use of pronouns could predict whose health would improve the most. Those who had the greatest benefit changed their pronoun use from one essay to another.
Pronouns were reflecting people’’s abilities to change perspective.
This lead to further study. Peenebaker began to look at pronoun use in other texts like blogs, emails, speeches, essays and verbal communication. He found his initial findings to be true.
For example, use of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) was consistently related to gender, age, social class, honesty, status, personality, and much more. Although the findings were often robust, people in daily life were unable to pick them up when reading or listening to others. It was almost as if there was a secret world of pronouns that existed outside our awareness.
Pennebaker studied email communication and found status played a huge part in pronoun use:
One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status.
Having thought himself to be a warm and friendly guy, Pennebaker took his findings and looked closely at his own emails:
When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached — hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.
He also found trends in college admission essays:
Across four years, we analyzed the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students’ major.
Take a look at how you write and relate with others. Even as I write this, my heads spinning. I keep wondering, “Do I sound stupid? Am I condescending?”
This is certainly something I will be mindful of these next weeks as I analyze my own writing voice.
How about you?
Often times my wife looks at me as if I were speaking in some weird code. Maybe I am?
[via Scientific American | Image via Marc Wathieu]
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