More confident, less formal: stylistic changes in academic psychology writing from 1970 to 2016

Wheeler, Melissa; Vylomova, Ekaterina; McGrath, Melanie J.; Haslam, Nick

doi:10.1007/s11192-021-04166-9

Cited by 10 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…An alternative interpretation is that the pattern reflects stylistic changes in psychology writing, perhaps specific to abstracts, in which more expressive language has become acceptable, desirable, or expected. For instance, Wheeler et al ( 2021 ) demonstrated a rise in informal writing within academic psychology abstracts. Although this second interpretation runs counter to the decreased use of emotionally toned words found in psychology textbooks by Sell and Farreras ( 2017 ), it may be consistent with the increased use of both positive and negative words in the scientific abstracts from 1970 to 2014 documented by Vinkers et al ( 2015 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, although the abstracts provide dense and standardized summaries of psychological research, they may not be the ideal medium for assessing the overall positivity or focus of that research. Abstracts combine neutral reporting on concepts, findings, and methods with an advertising function, and their stylistic aspects, and requirements may distort the assessment of their content focus (Wheeler et al, 2021 ). A more comprehensive assessment might employ full article texts, although this is prohibitively difficult due to copyright restrictions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Has Psychology Become More Positive? Trends in Language Use in Article Abstracts

2022

Self Cite

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The positive psychology movement, launched near the start of the twenty-first century, aimed to shift the focus of psychology away from misery, conflict, and pathology toward happiness, human flourishing, and wellbeing. However, there have been few attempts to gauge whether psychology as a whole has become more positive in its focus. This study tested this possibility by examining a corpus of 829,701 abstracts from articles published in 875 psychology journals between 1970 and 2017. Positivity was indexed by the positive emotion dictionary using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count tool and a newly constructed positive character dictionary. Both indices showed a steep rise through the study period, with the positive character index's rise occurring since 2000. A Negative Emotion index also rose linearly over the study period, suggesting that the rise in positive emotion might reflect in part a general increase in affective or evaluative language use. While there appears to have been an increase in psychology's positivity, that increase is complex, non-linear, and the degree to which it can be ascribed to positive psychology remains uncertain.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Has Psychology Become More Positive? Trends in Language Use in Article Abstracts

2022

Self Cite

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“…5). A vast amount of literature has confirmed the increase in the use of first‐person pronouns, which are often a natural choice for the syntactic structure of these texts, in several science fields (Wheeler et al, 2021). A scientific article usually describes an experiment, or a series of experiments conducted by the authors, and the use of first personal pronouns can be traced back to the first examples of scientific journal in the 17th century (Kronick, 1984).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic changes in the transition from summaries to abstracts: The case of the Journal of Experimental Medicine

2021

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The introduction of Abstracts to replace article summaries in 1990 recognized changes to linguistic reporting that have been apparent during the century.• The 1970s showed a dramatic increase in the informal language used in article abstracts and summaries.• The Journal of Experimental Medicine (JEM) demonstrates an increase in first-person pronouns within article abstracts and summaries, but moves from singular to plural to represent the increase in multi-authored research works.• Linguistic changes during the century also include a greater focus on the future rather than the past, and an increase in language that indicates 'clout' which signifies author self-confidence.

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“…The details of the abstract and the acknowledgments corpora are presented in Table 1. All texts were analyzed using LIWC Version 2015 because it has shown validity in processing various academic text genres, such as journal abstracts and grant proposals (Hartley, Pennebaker & Fox, 2003;Markowitz, 2019;Wheeler et al, 2021). As indicated in the introduction, we analyzed four main LIWC categories, including analytical thinking, tone, dictionary words, and social words.…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Computerized text analysis programs, such as Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker et al, 2015), offer an alternative approach to examining the writing style of academic texts (e.g., Tieken–Boon van Ostade, 2013, 2020; Wheeler et al, 2021). The working mechanism of LIWC is that it calculates the percentage of words in a text that corresponds to meaningful linguistic, social, and psychological categories in the LIWC dictionary.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language as an interpersonal marker in English dissertation acknowledgments

Jia

2022

English Today

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Expressing gratitude and patronage in the form of dedication or acknowledgment can be traced back to the 16th century (Görlach, 2004). In the present time, writing an acknowledgment section has become a common practice in scholarly works, such as books, dissertations, theses, and journal articles. Research on acknowledgments as a text type, however, is relatively new. In his pioneering work, Hyland (2003) dubbed dissertation acknowledgments ‘a Cinderella genre’ because it is often regarded as a taken-for-granted component in a dissertation and has not received due academic attention. Unlike other conventional academic genres that aim to establish claims and reputation, dissertation acknowledgments reflect the reciprocal gift-giving among scholars, constituting ‘the most explicitly interpersonal genre of the academy’ (Hyland, 2004: 323). In addition to expressing gratitude to others, writers also use the acknowledgments section to build interpersonal relationships with their academic colleagues and/or professional communities (Chan, 2015). In this study, we adopt computerized text analysis to further explore how language patterns mark the interpersonal features in English dissertation acknowledgments.

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More confident, less formal: stylistic changes in academic psychology writing from 1970 to 2016

Cited by 10 publications

References 24 publications

Has Psychology Become More Positive? Trends in Language Use in Article Abstracts

Has Psychology Become More Positive? Trends in Language Use in Article Abstracts

Linguistic changes in the transition from summaries to abstracts: The case of the Journal of Experimental Medicine

Language as an interpersonal marker in English dissertation acknowledgments

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