Linguistic styles: Language use as an individual difference.

Pennebaker, James W.; King, Laura A.

doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1296

Cited by 1,454 publications

(1,454 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Previous studies have documented the relations of neuroticism with perfectionism (Hill, McIntire, & Bacharach, 1997), greater engagement in lower visibility behaviors (e.g., negative inner thought processing), and self-evaluation (Funder & Dobroth, 1987). These findings also confirm previous research that those high on neuroticism tend to use more negative emotion words across contexts (Pennebaker and King, 1999).…”

Section: Question #3: How Are the Self-concept Dimensions Related To supporting

confidence: 81%

“…It has previously been found that people high on conscientiousness tend to use more positive emotion words (e.g., Pennebaker & King, 1999). Indeed, in this study, we found that conscientiousness had a positive correlation with Maturity (r = .13, p <.001).…”

Section: Question #3: How Are the Self-concept Dimensions Related To supporting

confidence: 70%

“…The stream of consciousness essay was a class exercise that was available online wherein students were asked to track their thoughts as they occurred for 20 minutes (see Pennebaker & King, 1999 for detailed description and psychometrics of the method). Of the students who completed the self-description essay, 1104 completed the stream of consciousness essay.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Revealing dimensions of thinking in open-ended self-descriptions: An automated meaning extraction method for natural language

Chung

Pennebaker

2008

Journal of Research in Personality

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192

178

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A new method for extracting common themes from written text is introduced and applied to 1,165 open-ended self-descriptive narratives. Drawing on a lexical approach to personality, the most commonly-used adjectives within narratives written by college students were identified using computerized text analytic tools. A factor analysis on the use of these adjectives in the selfdescriptions produced a 7-factor solution consisting of psychologically meaningful dimensions. Some dimensions were unipolar (e.g., Negativity factor, wherein most loaded items were negatively valenced adjectives); others were dimensional in that semantically opposite words clustered together (e.g., Sociability factor, wherein terms such as shy, outgoing, reserved, and loud all loaded in the same direction). The factors exhibited modest reliability across different types of writ writing samples and were correlated with self-reports and behaviors consistent with the dimensions. Similar analyses with additional content words (adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs) yielded additional psychological dimensions associated with physical appearance, school, relationships, etc. in which people contextualize their self-concepts. The results suggest that the meaning extraction method is a promising strategy that determines the dimensions along which people think about themselves. Keywords LIWC; Meaning Extraction Method; natural language; self-descriptionsIn a job or clinical interview, meeting an office mate for the first time, or talking to someone at a party, we usually ask others to tell us about themselves. Directly or indirectly, we elicit people's descriptions of themselves to construct a coherent sense of them. With the exception of a small group of social and personality psychologists, most people consider free descriptions as the currency of everyday life. From the media describing politicians and celebrities, reference letters, or through casual observation and gossip, much of what we think and know about others is shaped by everyday descriptions of them.Although free descriptions are the natural form of appraising what people are like, most formal personality assessment methods use itemized questionnaires. With statistical methods, questionnaires make it easy to summarize people's personality trait levels, to make comparisons across respondents, and to generalize across groups. With a common vocabulary of personality factors, it is easy for researchers to communicate with one another about the major dimensions of personality that are associated with a variety of behaviors. A recurring

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Section: Question #3: How Are the Self-concept Dimensions Related To supporting

confidence: 81%

Section: Question #3: How Are the Self-concept Dimensions Related To supporting

confidence: 70%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Revealing dimensions of thinking in open-ended self-descriptions: An automated meaning extraction method for natural language

Chung

Pennebaker

2008

Journal of Research in Personality

Self Cite

192

178

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“…For instance, AI has been scored in U.S. presidents' inaugural speeches (e.g., Winter, 1991Winter, , 2001, letters of CEOs to the stockholders of their companies (Diaz, 1982, in McClelland, 1987, and, with a slightly extended scoring criterion, in the diaries of substance abuse patients and the journal abstracts of social scientists (Pennebaker & King, 1999). Thus, the verbal material that people generate in their private and professional lives may provide clues to how they deal with stressful challenges; whether they are more likely to recruit RH functions, LH functions, or both in equal measure.…”

Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Activity inhibition: A predictor of lateralized brain function during stress?

Schultheiss¹,

Riebel²,

Jones³

2009

Neuropsychology

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The authors tested the hypothesis that activity inhibition (AI), a measure of the frequency of the word "not" in written material, marks a propensity to engage functions of the right hemisphere (RH) and disengage functions of the left hemisphere (LH), particularly during stress. Study 1 and Study 2 showed that high AI predicts faster detection of stimuli presented to the RH, relative to the LH. Study 2 provided evidence that the AI-laterality effect is specific to perceptual, but not motor, laterality and that it is particularly strong in individuals with low mood, but absent in individuals in a positive mood state. Study 3 showed that negative affective stimuli prime the AI-laterality effect more strongly than positive affective stimuli. Findings from Study 4 suggest that situationally induced frustration (losing a contest), in conjunction with high AI, leads to increased attentional laterality. The present findings substantially bolster the construct validity of AI and contribute to a better understanding of earlier findings linking AI to physiological stress responses, immune system functioning, alcohol abuse, and nonverbal behavior.

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“…Past research suggests that these different orientations are apparent in narratives. In a study of written narratives, introversion was found to be associated with a tendency to make distinctions through the use of exclusive words such as "but" and "except," and tentative words such as "perhaps" and "maybe," while extraversion was associated with a higher frequency of inclusive words, such as "and" and "with" (Pennebaker & King, 1999). In a study of TAT stories, extraverts more often imported other characters into stories about a solitary figure than did introverts (Shapiro & Alexander, 1975).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Channeling identity: A study of storytelling in conversations between introverted and extraverted friends

Thorne

Korobov

Morgan

2007

Journal of Research in Personality

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This narrative study examined the process of personal storytelling between college-age friends who were similarly introverted or extraverted. Participants were 19 introverted and 20 extraverted samesex pairs (49 percent female) who had been friends for an average of 18 months. Stories emerged spontaneously during 10-minute catch-up conversations. Extraverted friends more often told stories that changed the topic, and more often co-constructed story plots. Introverted friends more often told stories that were embedded in a developing theme, and constructed story plots solo. With regard to content, extraverted friends told stories about romance more so than introverted friends, whose stories more often concerned family/hometown, and older events. The findings suggest that the traits of extraversion and introversion channel the identity-making process. Keywordsintroversion; extraversion; friendship; stories; identity; narrative; discourse; traits; conversation One cannot grasp the most profound logic of the social world unless one becomes immersed in the specificity of an empirical reality (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 271) With the advent of narrative psychology (Bruner, 1990), the concept of personality has expanded beyond the domain of traits, such as extraversion, to encompass identity, or the sense that people make of their lives through telling stories (McAdams, 2001). This expansion of the concept of personality to include life stories has enhanced the degree to which personality psychology attends to the whole person (McAdams, 1995), but the expansion has not been easy. A notable difficulty in connecting traits and life stories is that traits tend to be construed as genetic endowments, and life stories as psychosocial constructions (McAdams, 2001). However, it is now widely recognized that traits such as extraversion, while genetically based (e.g., Plomin, Chipuer, & Loehlin, 1990), become developmentally elaborated through psychosocial processes (Caspi, 1998).The present study builds on the idea that traits help to channel the development of other domains of personality (McLean & Pasupathi, 2006;Winter, John, Stewart, Klohnen, & Duncan, 1998). We investigated this channeling by exploring how people actively construct or "do" personality in everyday life (Cantor, 1990). A performative approach to the development of personality traits has been well-articulated by Caspi (1998), whose model of developmental Address correspondence to: Avril Thorne, University of California, Santa Cruz, Department of Psychology, 277 Social Sciences 2, Santa Cruz, CA 95064,, E-mail: avril@ucsc.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, an...

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Linguistic styles: Language use as an individual difference.

Cited by 1,454 publications

References 53 publications

Revealing dimensions of thinking in open-ended self-descriptions: An automated meaning extraction method for natural language

Revealing dimensions of thinking in open-ended self-descriptions: An automated meaning extraction method for natural language

Activity inhibition: A predictor of lateralized brain function during stress?

Channeling identity: A study of storytelling in conversations between introverted and extraverted friends

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