Did you know your usage of pronouns and prepositions might reveal parts of your personality that you’re not even aware of? Language is powerful, even the words you don’t even think about, like pronouns.
Our guest Dr. James Pennebaker is a social psychologist and currently holds the position of the Regents Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies the ways emotional experiences, natural language, and physical and mental health all affect one another.
We discuss the language used by the President and former Presidents, analyses of the language used during coronavirus as an indicator of mental well-being, and findings presented in his most recent book, The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us. https://amzn.to/3dARYra
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Key takeaways:
- James Pennebaker’s work was born out of a need to base psychological on real-world behaviors.
- Some parts of speech are processed in the brain differently than others. Knowing this, one can understand people better through the language they use.
- When analyzing the language used by people during the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Pennebaker found significant increases in anxious language and a decrease in language suggesting anger. This is beginning to reverse.
What to listen for:
01:44 How did you, as a social psychologist, decide to study people’s words?
6:33 Dr. Pennebaker discusses his findings of his language analyzing software, Linguistic Inquiry & Word Count (LIWC), which countered stereotypical perceptions about gender and language patterns.
10:19 How do we process various components of language differently in our brains?
20:00 Deceit is very difficult to detect, even for computers. Dr. Pennebaker explains why.
25:06 Pronoun usage provides insight into how a person, even the President of the United States, might be thinking.
31:58 Analysis of Trump and Obama’s tweets while in office
35:20 Pronoun usage can indicate states of mental health.
36:40 What are you seeing through language analyses happening during the COVID-19 pandemic?
43:08 What will the future look like after COVID-19?
Reference materials:
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
Linguistic Inquiry & Word Count
The Online Research Consortium
Quotes:
“Early on I became a little bit appalled that so much of social psychology was based on questionnaires.
We didn’t look at what people were actually doing, we just asked them what they thought they were doing.” [02:55]
“It wasn’t that I was interested in language, but as a tool to understand people it turned out to be an unbelievably rich source of information” [10:02]
“What the hell is going on in our culture that tweets are a form of conversation?” [33:29]
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Until next time…
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