The Secret Life of Pronouns (36 page)

97    Some of the criticisms of the TAT mirror those about the Rorschach. For example, the traditional judge-based method of grading essays is subjective. Two people could look at the same writing sample and come away with very different interpretations. Another problem is that when you ask the same person to write a story about the same picture on two occasions, they usually think up a new story to tell, often with different themes. Traditional personality researchers want tests that provide the same results on different occasions. Unfortunately, people are too inventive—they like to create new stories, especially if they have to tell them to the same people.

99    The bin Laden project was published by Pennebaker and Chung (2008). Cindy Chung, Art Graesser, Jeff Hancock, David Beaver, and I have all been immersed in a broader endeavor to learn how leaders change in their rhetoric over time. Hitler, Mao, Castro, as well as less extreme western leaders share changes in language use prior to going to wars, after being attacked, and as their regimes begin to fail.

100    To learn more about other text analysis methods, refer back to the notes for page 6 of the book.

CHAPTER 5: EMOTION DETECTION

106    Many people have argued that emotions affect the ways we think. Barbara Fredrickson, for example, has proposed a broaden-and-build model of positive emotions. Her studies suggest that when people are happy, they are able to pull back, see a broader perspective, and build new ideas. Thomas Borkovec has found that people who are sad or depressed tend to focus their negative feelings on past events, whereas people who are anxious are more worried about future events. Recently, Charles Carver and Eddie Harmon-Jones have provided compelling evidence to suggest that the emotion of anger activates brain areas associated with approach—much like positive emotions. Feelings of sadness or anxiety are linked to brain areas typically associated with avoidance.

108–110    The links between depression and self-focused attention have been independently discovered by several labs over the last thirty years. Walter Weintraub, one of the founding fathers of word analysis, was the first to report it in his 1981 book on verbal behavior. Tom Pysczynski and Jeff Greenberg developed a general theory of self-focus as a cause of depression. In addition to the suicidal poet project by Shannon Stirman and me published in 2001, a paper by Rude, Gortner, and Pennebaker (2004) found depressed college students used more I-words in their essays about their college experience than non-depressed students. See also recent work by Kaufman and Sexton on self-focus among suicidal poets.

110–114    The Giuliani project reference is Pennebaker and Lay (2002).

115    Dan Wegner’s research on thought suppression is ingenious on several levels. Drawing on Tolstoy’s childhood experience, Wegner asked students to
not
think of a white bear for as little as a minute or two. In doing so, he found that they actually started thinking of bears at high rates. More striking, when students were told that they no longer had to suppress their white bear thoughts, many students reported thinking of white bears at even higher rates. Wegner’s early studies led him to develop a series of important theories about how the mind monitors information.

117–121    A number of investigators are now using blogs and other social media to track the emotional states of large communities of people. For example, Peter Dodds and Christopher Danforth have done this to track happiness, as has Adam Kramer; Bob Kraut, a pioneer of Internet research in psychology, has examined bulletin message boards to track emotional support in online communities; Elizabeth Lyons, Matthias Mehl, and I have analyzed blogs by pro-anorexics to assess their emotional profiles; Markus Wolf, Cindy Chung, and Hans Kordy have analyzed e-mails by psychotherapy patients to their therapists.

122    Over the years, my students and I have studied several large upheavals. Most of this work has attempted to understand how large-scale emotional events unfold over time. To read more about them, see the papers on the Texas A&M bonfire disaster (Gortner and Pennebaker, 2003); the death of Princess Diana (Stone and Pennebaker, 2002); the Loma Prieta earthquake and the Persian Gulf War (Pennebaker and Harber, 1993); and September 11, 2001 (Cohn, Mehl, and Pennebaker, 2004; Mehl and Pennebaker, 2003).

122–123    My colleague Darren Newtson and I traveled around Oregon and Washington for about a month after Mount St. Helens erupted. In towns that had experienced a great deal of damage, we randomly interviewed people by going door-to-door and by making random phone calls. One of the more interesting findings was that the more damage that had been done to a community, the more the residents wanted to talk. Those communities that were close to the volcano but that escaped damage were the most suspicious of outsiders and were least likely to agree to be interviewed. See my earlier book
Opening Up
for a more detailed account.

123    A particularly promising development in social psychology concerns “affective forecasting.” According to its founders, Dan Gilbert, Tim Wilson, and others, people are remarkably bad at guessing how they will react to a future event. In general, people predict that they will be more distressed about a traumatic experience than they actually would be.

124    Societies frequently adopt well-intentioned interventions that don’t work. In addition to CISD, abstinence-only sex education and D.A.R.E. have generally caused more problems than they solved. See Timothy D. Wilson’s book
Redirect
.

125    Cindy Chung’s dissertation involved tracking 186 bloggers on a blog community devoted to dieting for one year.

126    Are secrets always toxic? Actually, no. In fact, secrets may be bad but telling others can sometimes be worse. For a wonderful summary of the psychology of secrets, see Anita Kelly’s book and articles.

126–127    The story of Laura was first described in my book
Opening Up
.

127    People have a powerful urge to talk about emotional events. Bernard Rimé and his colleagues find that people across all cultures typically confide in others for virtually all types of emotional events. One of my favorite findings is that if you have an emotional experience and you tell someone about it
and
you ask your friend to keep it secret, your friend will tell two or three others about it. Even hearing about a secret is an emotional event that the listener needs to share.

CHAPTER 6: LYING WORDS

131    The research on the physiology of confession involved people talking about the most traumatic experience of their lives into a tape recorder. All potential identifying information from the story has been changed. From an article by Pennebaker, Hughes, and O’Heeron (1987).

134    For anyone seeking a discussion of self-deception in English literature, I recommend the writer and scholar Jim Magnuson. His wisdom on this and other topics has been invaluable to me in our discussions over the years.

140    Somewhere between self-deception, deception, and marketing is the concept of “spin.” In the political world,
spin
is defined as the art of glossing over the truth. Indeed, after an important debate or speech, political operatives will often meet with members of the press to spin the speech of their own candidate to make it sound even better than it was and spin the opponent’s words to sound worse. In fact, a cutting-edge computational linguist at Queen’s University in Canada, David Skillicorn, has developed a model to identify spin based on linguistic features associated with deception (research.cs.queensu.ca/home/skill/election/election.html).

140–141    In his
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
, Freud devotes a surprising amount of time to slips of the tongue, or, as he refers to them, parapraxes. In retrospect, you can understand why he used parapraxes as a way to introduce his general theory. Everyday slips of the tongue are common and reveal certain truths about what people are really thinking.

142–143    I’m indebted to Melanie Greenberg for allowing me to reanalyze her language data.

144–146    A fascinating account of the Stephen Glass case is available at www.rickmcginnis.com/articles/Glassindex.htm. For the analyses, I only examined thirty-nine of his forty-one stories (one was co-written by someone else and the other was made up exclusively of published quotes).

Somehow relevant to this discussion is a wonderful quote by author Mary McCarthy. In 1979, she was interviewed by the television host Dick Cavett about the author Lillian Hellman, who had a reputation for fabricating some of her stories. When asked about Hellman’s work, McCarthy snorted, “Every word she writes is a lie, including
and
and
the
.” Hellman subsequently filed a defamation suit against McCarthy, which was dropped after Hellman’s death in 1984.

149    There are several other fascinating papers that are worth mentioning in the literature on high-stakes, real-world deception detection using computerized text analysis. For example, David Skillicorn and his colleagues, as well as Max Louwerse, Gun Semin, and their colleagues, along with other labs around the world have examined the e-mails between Enron employees during the decade leading up to the company’s bankruptcy in 2001 due to its fraudulent accounting activities. In addition, David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina used computerized text analysis to classify deceptive versus truthful chief executives in their quarterly earnings conference calls.

152–153    The project by Denise Huddle and me has not yet been submitted for publication. One additional finding is particularly noteworthy. Recall that I-words signal innocence. Closer inspection indicated that it wasn’t all I-words. In fact, the more that defendants used the actual word
I
(and
I’ll
,
I’m
,
I’d
, etc.), the more likely they were to be innocent. In fact, use of the word
me
was used more by the truly guilty.

155    The dating project is by Toma, Hancock, and Ellison (2008).

165    Discrepancy or modal verbs identify words that make a distinction between an ideal and a real state. “I
should
be eating vegetables” indicates that I’m not eating them (reality) but the ideal person would be. Columbia University psychologist Tory Higgins has developed an elaborate theory around the self-discrepancy idea that has implications for goals, motivations, and mental health. The ideal-real discrepancy is also inherent in Robert Wicklund’s work on self-awareness.

167    I love performatives. Not only are they psychologically interesting but they are at the center of some eye-opening debates in philosophy. Check out the work of the philosopher John Searle and also John L. Austin.

168    Although not discussed here, another verbal feature of deception is the use of words such as
um
or
er
. A recent article by Joanne Arciuli and her colleagues is worth reading. Also, see Michael Erard’s book
Um
.

CHAPTER 7. THE LANGUAGE OF STATUS, POWER, AND LEADERSHIP

176    Recall that pronouns tell us where people are paying attention. Many of the pronoun effects we see with humans match the gaze finding among nonhuman primates. For a delightful analysis of status hierarchies in chimpanzees, see the work of Frans De Waal. In humans, visual cues to dominance have been discussed by Jack Dovidio and his colleagues.

188–189    John Dean, personal communications, August 30, 2002.

190    I’m indebted to Ethan Burris and his colleagues for allowing us to reanalyze their data for this project.

192    The leadership literature has grown increasingly complex. To get a flavor of some of the directions, see the pioneering work of Fred Fiedler. A summary of research dealing with leadership among women and men is best captured by Alice Eagly and her colleagues. David Waldman and his group have done a nice job of examining leadership attributes.

194    Another example of language shifts across languages and cultures was discovered by Doug Sofer as part of his dissertation. He found that the use of the first-person singular in letters to the presidents of the South American country Colombia between 1944 and 1958 differed by social class. As you might guess, the lower the social class of the author, the higher their use of I-words. See also the seminal work of Howard Giles on accommodation theory, a framework for understanding when people shift in their language to match their interaction partners.

194    Thanks to George Theodoridis for his observations on Ancient Greek language (personal communication, November 6, 2009).

195    Note that there are other language dimensions that we find to be linked to status. Although the effects are modest, people with lower status tend to use the following word categories more: negations, impersonal pronouns, tentative words, swear words.

CHAPTER 8: THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE

197–198    The IM interaction was part of the Slatcher and Pennebaker (2006) project. The on-air fight between Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Rosie O’Donnell that follows had been brewing for several months. O’Donnell had already announced that she was leaving the show in three weeks. The overall interaction between the two women evidenced a language style matching (or LSM) score of .94—which is exceedingly high.

202–204    The research on the mirror neuron system continues to be controversial. There is an increasing number of studies that demonstrate highly specialized brain activity in Broca’s area that reflects behavioral mimicking. The primary objection about the mirror neuron approach is that no consistent theory or model explains how it works or how it is related to cognitive activity. Particularly interesting papers are available by Rizzolatti and Craighero (2004), Kimberly Montgomery and her colleagues (2009), and Kotz et al. (2010).

207    The LSM project dealing with liars was conducted by Hancock, Curry, Goorha, and Woodworth (2008). For a report on additional text analyses of the same data, see Duran, Hall, McCarthy, and McNamara (2010).

208    Despite the intuitive appeal of multitasking, the evidence is clear that it is not an effective technique to accomplish even moderately complex tasks. A particularly convincing case of the downside of multitasking has been published by Ophir, Nass, and Wagner (2009).