Psychological aspects of natural language. use: our words, our selves.

Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2003. 54:547–77doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145041Copyrightc

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2003 by Annual Reviews. All rights reservedFirst published online as a Review in Advance on August 14, 2002

P

SYCHOLOGICAL

A

SPECTS OF

N

ATURAL

L

ANGUAGE

U

SE

:

Our Words, Our Selves

James W. Pennebaker,Matthias R. Mehl,and Kate G. Niederhoffer

Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712;e-mail: Pennebaker@psy.utexas.edu, Mehl@psy.utexas.edu

Key Words

LIWC, text analysis, artiﬁcial intelligence, discourse, pronouns,particles

s

Abstract

The words people use in their daily lives can reveal important aspectsof their social and psychological worlds. With advances in computer technology, textanalysis allows researchers to reliably and quickly assess features of what peoplesay as well as subtleties in their linguistic styles. Following a brief review of severaltext analysis programs, we summarize some of the evidence that links natural worduse to personality, social and situational ﬂuctuations, and psychological interventions.Of particular interest are ﬁndings that point to the psychological value of studyingparticles—parts of speech that include pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctives,and auxiliary verbs. Particles, which serve as the glue that holds nouns and regularverbs together, can serve as markers of emotional state, social identity, and cognitivestyles.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

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548METHODS OF STUDYING LANGUAGE USE:PSYCHOLOGICAL WORD COUNT APPROACHES

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549The General Inquirer

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550Analyzing Emotion-Abstraction Patterns: TAS/C

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551Weintraub’s Analysis of Verbal Behavior

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551Analyzing Verbal Tone with DICTION

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552Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count

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553Biber: Factor Analyzing the English Language

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553Summary and Evaluation

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554WORD USE AS A REFLECTION OFINDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

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554Psychometric Properties of Word Use

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555Demographic Variables

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556Traditional Personality Measures

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558Mental Health and Psychopathology

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559Physical Health and Health Behavior

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548

PENNEBAKER

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MEHL

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NIEDERHOFFERWORD USE AS A REFLECTION OF SITUATIONALAND SOCIAL PROCESSES

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562Formal Versus Informal Settings

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562Deception and Honesty

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564Emotional Upheavals

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564Social Interactions

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566WORD USE AS A REFLECTION OF PSYCHOLOGICALAND HEALTH CHANGE

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567Use of Cognitive and Emotion Words

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567Use of Word Analyses in Psychotherapy

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568References to Self and Others: Pronouns and Perspectives

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569FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF WORD USE

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569Which Words Should We be Studying?

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570SOME FINAL WORDS: LIMITATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES

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571

INTRODUCTION

The ways people use words convey a great deal of information about themselves,their audience, and the situations they are in. Individuals’ choice of words canhint at their social status, age, sex, and motives. We sense if the speaker or writeris emotionally close or distant, thoughtful or shallow, and possibly extraverted,neurotic, or open to new experience. Although several

Annual Review

chaptershave summarized research on language acquisition, production, comprehension,and its links to brain activity, this is the first to discuss how language and, morespecifically, word use is a meaningful marker and occasional mediator of naturalsocial and personality processes.That the words people use are diagnostic of their mental, social, and evenphysical state is not a new concept. Freud (1901) provided several compellingexamplesinhisdiscussionofparapraxes,orslipsofthetongue.Hepointedoutthatcommonerrorsinspeechbetraypeople’sdeepermotivesorfears.Drawingheavilyon psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan (1968) extended these ideas by suggesting thatthe unconscious asserts itself through language. Indeed, language, in his view, isthe bridge to reality. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1976) argued that the ways wedescribe events define the meanings of the events and that these meanings help uskeep our grasp on reality. Similar assumptions are implicit in much of the work insociolinguistics(e.g.,Eckert1999,Tannen1994),narrativeanddiscourseanalyses(Schiffrin 1994), and communication research (Robinson & Giles 2001).This article explores the methods and recent findings on word use rather thanlanguage per se: the styles in which people use words rather than the content of what they say. The distinction between linguistic style and linguistic content canbe seen in how two people may make a simple request. “Would it be possible foryou to pass me the salt?” and “Pass the salt,” both express the speaker’s desirefor salt and direct the listener’s action. However, the two utterances also revealdifferent features of the interactants’ relationship, the speaker’s personality, andperhaps the way the speaker understands himself.

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WORD USE

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Because word use is a relatively unstudied phenomenon, this article focuseson four broad topics. The first deals with ways researchers have tried to study theways people naturally use words. By “natural,” we refer to relatively open-endedresponses to questions, natural interactions, and written or spoken text. The mostcommonmethodologiesincludemanualwordcountsand,morerecently,computeranalyses of language. The second section of this article explores recent findingslinking word use to individual differences. The final two sections consider thelinks between word usage and social or situational differences and how we canuse words to mark psychological change.

METHODS OF STUDYING LANGUAGE USE:PSYCHOLOGICAL WORD COUNT APPROACHES

Although many of the assumptions about language as a psychological marker areshared, the methods of studying language and word use have often been a battle-ground. Most narrative researchers assume that language is, by definition, contex-tual. Consequently, phrases, sentences, or entire texts must be considered withinthe context of the goals of the speaker and the relationship between the speakerand the audience. Because of the complexity of communication, this strategy as-sumes that the investigator must attend to the meaning of the utterances in context.However defined, meaning is believed to be sufficiently multilayered to only bedecoded by human judges who then evaluate what is said or written. Qualitativeanalyses, then, provide the researcher with broad impressions or agreed-upon de-scriptionsoftextsamples.Veryfewdiscourseanalysesrelyonnumbersorstatistics(e.g., Schiffrin 1994).An alternative perspective is that features of language or word use can becounted and statistically analyzed. Quantitative approaches to text analysis havegained increasing popularity over the past half century (for reviews see Popping2000, Smith 1992, Weber 1994, West 2001). The existing approaches can be cat-egorized into three broad methodologies.

Judge-based thematic content analyses

typicallyinvolvejudgeswhoidentifythepresenceofcriticalthematicreferencesintext samples on the basis of empirically developed coding systems (Smith 1992).Thematic content analyses have been widely applied for studying a variety of psychological phenomena such as motive imagery (e.g., Atkinson & McClelland1948,Heckhausen1963,Winter1994),explanatorystyles(Peterson1992),cogni-tive complexity (Suedfeld et al. 1992), psychiatric syndromes (Gottschalk 1997),goal structures (Stein et al. 1997), arousal patterns associated with cultural shifts(Martindale 1990), and levels of thinking (Pennebaker et al. 1990).A relatively new approach,

word pattern analysis

, has emerged from the arti-ﬁcial intelligence community. Rather than exploring text “top down” within thecontext of previously deﬁned psychological content dimensions or word cate-gories, word pattern strategies mathematically detect “bottom-up” how words co-vary across large samples of text (Foltz 1998, Popping 2000). One particularlypromising strategy is latent semantic analysis (LSA) (e.g., Landauer & Dumais

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