Papers by James Pennebaker
Depressive symptomatology is manifested in greater first-person singular pronoun use (i.e., Italk... more Depressive symptomatology is manifested in greater first-person singular pronoun use (i.e., Italk), but when and for whom this effect is most apparent, and the extent to which it is specific to depression or part of a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk, remains unclear. Using pooled data from N = 4,754 participants from 6 labs across 2 countries, we examined, in a preregistered analysis, how the depression-I-talk effect varied by (a) first-person singular pronoun type (i.e., subjective, objective, and possessive), (b) the communication context in which language was generated (i.e., personal, momentary thought, identity-related, and impersonal), and (c) gender. Overall, there was a small but reliable positive correlation between depression and I-talk (r = .10, 95% CI [.07, .13]). The effect was present for all first-person singular pronouns except the possessive type, in all communication contexts except the impersonal one, and for both females and males with little evidence of gender differences. Importantly, a similar pattern of results emerged for negative emotionality. Further, the depression-I-talk effect was substantially reduced when controlled for negative emotionality but this was not the case when the negative emotionality-I-talk effect was controlled for depression. These results suggest that the robust empirical link between depression and I-talk largely reflects a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk. Self-referential language using first-person singular pronouns may therefore be better construed as a linguistic marker of general distress proneness or negative emotionality rather than as a specific marker of depression.
Physiological psychology, Sep 1, 1975
Members of two subspecies of deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) that differ in social gregarious... more Members of two subspecies of deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) that differ in social gregariousness were given septal lesions and tested for pairwise sociability. Gracilis normally a highly social animal, became even more gregarious following septal damage, while bairdi, which normally shows avoidance of social contact, showed further reductions in sociability. The findings lend no support to a previous suggestion that septal lesions enhance sociability generally across species; instead, they suggest that reported increases in social contact in lesioned animals are a secondary consequence of the lesion's tendency to enhance predominant behavior patterns.
Choice Reviews Online, Apr 1, 2012
PLOS ONE, Dec 1, 2022
As social media has proliferated, a key aspect to making meaningful connections with people onlin... more As social media has proliferated, a key aspect to making meaningful connections with people online has been revealing important parts of one's identity. In this work, we study changes that occur in people's language use after they share a specific piece of their identity: a depression diagnosis. To do so, we collect data from over five thousand users who have made such a statement, which we refer to as an identity claim. Prior to making a depression identity claim, the Reddit user's language displays evidence of increasingly higher rates of anxiety, sadness, and cognitive processing language compared to matched controls. After the identity claim, these language markers decrease and more closely match the controls. Similarly, first person singular pronoun usage decreases following the identity claim, which was previously previously found to be indicative of self-focus and associated with depression. By further considering how and to whom people express their identity, we find that the observed longitudinal changes are larger for those who do so in ways that are more correlated with seeking help (sharing in a post instead of a comment; sharing in a mental health support forum). This work suggests that there may be benefits to sharing one's depression diagnosis, especially in a semi-anonymous forum where others are likely to be empathetic.
Do in-class discussion groups lead to improved learning for individual group members? Analyses of... more Do in-class discussion groups lead to improved learning for individual group members? Analyses of over 1600 students' language samples from 4800+ online discussion groups revealed that markers of linguistic engagement were highly predictive of academic outcomes.
SAGE Open, Jul 1, 2018
The 2016 election provided more language and polling data than any previous election. In addition... more The 2016 election provided more language and polling data than any previous election. In addition, the election spurred a new level of social media coverage. The current study analyzed the language of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton from the debates as well as the tweets of millions of people during the fall presidential campaign. In addition, aggregated polling data allowed for a comparison of daily election-relevant language from Twitter and fluctuations in voter preference. Overall, Trump's debate language was low in analytic/formal thinking and high in negative emotional tone and authenticity. Clinton was high in analytic and positive emotions, low in authenticity. The analysis of almost 10 million tweets revealed that Trumprelevant tweets were generally more positive than Clinton-related tweets. Most important were lag analyses that predicted polling numbers a week later from tweets. In general, when Clinton-related tweets were more analytic, her subsequent poll numbers dropped. Similarly, positive emotion language in the Clinton-related tweets predicted lower poll numbers a week later. Conversely, Trump-related tweets that were high in positive emotion and in analytic thinking predicted higher subsequent polling. In other words, when Twitter language about the candidates was used in ways inconsistent with the candidates themselves, their poll numbers went up. We propose two possible explanations for these findings: the projection hypothesis, a desire to seek qualities the candidates are missing, and the participant hypothesis, a shift in who is participating in the Twitter conversation over the course of the campaigns.
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Sep 11, 2019
Narcissism is unrelated to using first-person singular pronouns. Whether narcissism is linked to ... more Narcissism is unrelated to using first-person singular pronouns. Whether narcissism is linked to other language use remains unclear. We aimed to identify linguistic markers of narcissism. We applied the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to texts (k = 15; N = 4,941
There is a culturally-held belief that good narratives are associated with good mental or physica... more There is a culturally-held belief that good narratives are associated with good mental or physical health. Scores of studies have demonstrated that writing about emotional upheavals can have salutary health effects. Despite the writing-health relationship, there is scant evidence that expressive writing samples that are judged to be good narratives are themselves linked to health change. Across multiple studies, linguistic features of essays have been empirically linked to health changes. For example, use of positive emotions, increasing use of causal and other cognitive words, and shifts in pronoun use are correlated with fewer physician visits. These language markers, however, are not strongly related to the quality of narrative. Whereas most research has been conducted with English-speaking samples, new analytic methods suggest that many of the language findings can be exported to other languages and cultures. Implications for our understanding narrative, language, and culture within the context of new language analytic methods are discussed. (Narrative, Expressive Writing, Health, Culture, Language) Requests for further information should be directed to Nairán Ramírez-Esparza and
Simpatía is a cultural script that characterizes Hispanics as agreeable, friendly, sympathetic, a... more Simpatía is a cultural script that characterizes Hispanics as agreeable, friendly, sympathetic, and polite. However, on self-reports Hispanics score lower on Simpatía/Agreeableness than do non-Hispanics. This study reveals that it is the modesty within Simpatía that accounts for these paradoxical findings by driving down scores on Hispanics' self-reports. To test this idea, this study assesses Simpatía/Agreeableness in Mexican American bilinguals using (a) self-reports of Simpatía in English and Spanish and (b) behavioral manifestations of Simpatía in a social interaction task conducted in English and Spanish. As predicted, on self-reports bilinguals score lower on Simpatía when the assessment is in Spanish than when it is in English, but they show more Simpatía-related behaviors in the social interaction task in Spanish than in English. Follow-up analyses show that the results cannot be explained by translation artifacts on the questionnaire, response-style biases, or reference-group effects. The paradox sheds light on the complex interplay between culture and language.
arXiv (Cornell University), Jan 7, 2022
Lifelong experiences and learned knowledge lead to shared expectations about how common situation... more Lifelong experiences and learned knowledge lead to shared expectations about how common situations tend to unfold. Such knowledge of narrative event flow enables people to weave together a story. However, comparable computational tools to evaluate the flow of events in narratives are limited. We quantify the differences between autobiographical and imagined stories by introducing sequentiality, a measure of narrative flow of events, drawing probabilistic inferences from a cutting-edge large language model (GPT-3). Sequentiality captures the flow of a narrative by comparing the probability of a sentence with and without its preceding story context. We applied our measure to study thousands of diary-like stories, collected from crowdworkers about either a recent remembered experience or an imagined story on the same topic. The results show that imagined stories have higher sequentiality than autobiographical stories and that the sequentiality of autobiographical stories increases when the memories are retold several months later. In pursuit of deeper understandings of how sequentiality measures the flow of narratives, we explore proportions of major and minor events in story sentences, as annotated by crowdworkers. We find that lower sequentiality is associated with higher proportions of major events. The methods and results highlight opportunities to use cutting-edge computational analyses, such as sequentiality, on large corpora of matched imagined and autobiographical stories to investigate the influences of memory and reasoning on language generation processes.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2020
While language style is considered to be automatic and relatively stable, its plasticity has not ... more While language style is considered to be automatic and relatively stable, its plasticity has not yet been studied in translations that require the translator to “step into the shoes of another person.” In the present study, we propose a psychological model of language adaptation in translations. Focusing on an established interindividual difference marker of language style, that is, gender, we examined whether translators assimilate to the original gendered style or implicitly project their own gendered language style. In a preregistered study, we investigated gender differences in language use in TED Talks ( N = 1,647) and their translations ( N = 544) in same- versus opposite-gender speaker/translator dyads. The results showed that translators assimilated to gendered language styles even when in mismatch to their own gender. This challenges predominating views on language style as fixed and fosters a more dynamic view of language style as also being shaped by social context.
Journal of personality and social psychology, Jan 5, 2018
Depressive symptomatology is manifested in greater first-person singular pronoun use (i.e., I-tal... more Depressive symptomatology is manifested in greater first-person singular pronoun use (i.e., I-talk), but when and for whom this effect is most apparent, and the extent to which it is specific to depression or part of a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk, remains unclear. Using pooled data from N = 4,754 participants from 6 labs across 2 countries, we examined, in a preregistered analysis, how the depression-I-talk effect varied by (a) first-person singular pronoun type (i.e., subjective, objective, and possessive), (b) the communication context in which language was generated (i.e., personal, momentary thought, identity-related, and impersonal), and (c) gender. Overall, there was a small but reliable positive correlation between depression and I-talk (r = .10, 95% CI [.07, .13]). The effect was present for all first-person singular pronouns except the possessive type, in all communication contexts except the impersonal one, and for both females and males wi...
Psychology & Health, 2002
Inhibition or disclosure of traumatic or stressful experiences may affect psychological and physi... more Inhibition or disclosure of traumatic or stressful experiences may affect psychological and physical well-being. Although a diagnosis of cancer can be a source of considerable stress, the extent to which cancer patients disclose their cancer has not been previously documented. In the present study, 299 women with breast cancer reported how much and with whom they discussed their cancer in
Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 1984
Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1986
Se autoriza la reproducción total o parcial de este artículo, siempre y cuando se cite la fuente ... more Se autoriza la reproducción total o parcial de este artículo, siempre y cuando se cite la fuente completa y su dirección electrónica.
Nature Communications, Sep 10, 2020
To date we know little about natural emotion word repertoires, and whether or how they are associ... more To date we know little about natural emotion word repertoires, and whether or how they are associated with emotional functioning. Principles from linguistics suggest that the richness or diversity of individuals' actively used emotion vocabularies may correspond with their typical emotion experiences. The current investigation measures active emotion vocabularies in participant-generated natural speech and examined their relationships to individual differences in mood, personality, and physical and emotional well-being. Study 1 analyzes streamof-consciousness essays by 1,567 college students. Study 2 analyzes public blogs written by over 35,000 individuals. The studies yield consistent findings that emotion vocabulary richness corresponds broadly with experience. Larger negative emotion vocabularies correlate with more psychological distress and poorer physical health. Larger positive emotion vocabularies correlate with higher well-being and better physical health. Findings support theories linking language use and development with lived experience and may have future clinical implications pending further research.
Scientific Reports, 2022
The mental health of college students is a growing concern, and gauging the mental health needs o... more The mental health of college students is a growing concern, and gauging the mental health needs of college students is difficult to assess in real-time and in scale. To address this gap, researchers and practitioners have encouraged the use of passive technologies. Social media is one such "passive sensor" that has shown potential as a viable "passive sensor" of mental health. However, the construct validity and in-practice reliability of computational assessments of mental health constructs with social media data remain largely unexplored. Towards this goal, we study how assessing the mental health of college students using social media data correspond with ground-truth data of on-campus mental health consultations. For a large U.S. public university, we obtained ground-truth data of on-campus mental health consultations between 2011–2016, and collected 66,000 posts from the university’s Reddit community. We adopted machine learning and natural language methodol...
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2020
When people communicate with each other, their choice of what to say is tied to their perceptions... more When people communicate with each other, their choice of what to say is tied to their perceptions of the audience. For many communication channels, people have some ability to explicitly specify their audience members and the different roles they can play. While existing accounts of communication behavior have largely focused on how people tailor the content of their messages, we focus on the configuring of the audience as a complementary family of decisions in communication. We formulate a general description of audience configuration choices, highlighting key aspects of the audience that people could configure to reflect a range of communicative goals. We then illustrate these ideas via a case study of email usage-a realistic domain where audience configuration choices are particularly fine-grained and explicit in how email senders fill the To and Cc address fields. In a large collection of enterprise emails, we explore how people configure their audiences, finding salient pattern...
PLOS ONE, 2020
The huge power for social influence of digital media may come with the risk of intensifying commo... more The huge power for social influence of digital media may come with the risk of intensifying common societal biases, such as gender and age stereotypes. Speaker’s gender and age also behaviorally manifest in language use, and language may be a powerful tool to shape impact. The present study took the example of TED, a highly successful knowledge dissemination platform, to study online influence. Our goal was to investigate how gender- and age-linked language styles–beyond chronological age and identified gender–link to talk impact and whether this reflects gender and age stereotypes. In a pre-registered study, we collected transcripts of TED Talks along with their impact measures, i.e., views and ratios of positive and negative talk ratings, from the TED website. We scored TED Speakers’ (N= 1,095) language with gender- and age-morphed language metrics to obtain measures of female versus male, and younger versus more senior language styles. Contrary to our expectations and to the lite...
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Papers by James Pennebaker