Influencia de la sección longitudinal

How important is language? What do words tell us? Do the specific words that people use convey more than their surface meaning? Do different words convey different types of information about a person’s emotions, thoughts, and intentions? Is our use of words affected by the situations that we confront in our lives? Recent research by James Penne- baker and his colleagues suggests that the answers to these questions appears to be “yes.”

As described in the story that opened this chapter, for a number of years Penne- baker and his colleagues have examined the physical and psychological benefits of writing about one’s thoughts and feelings. Throughout a series of studies, Pennebaker found that people who disclosed traumatic events, particularly those they had never revealed before, showed improved physical and psychological health for months and, in some cases, years following the disclosure. For example, in a study with 63 unemployed workers, those who wrote about their thoughts and feelings associated with being unemployed found jobs more quickly than those who wrote about unrelated topics (Spera et al., 1994).

More recently, he has conducted linguistic analyses of written text with the goal of identifying what people’s word choices actually say about them and how those word choices affect others’ perceptions of them. Viewed this way, our language op- erates very much like a projective test (Chapter 12), revealing our personality, feel- ings, and emotional states. Different types of words reveal different aspects of the

self. For example, function words (e.g., pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs) convey information about an individual’s emotional state (e.g., depression), biological state (e.g., heart disease proneness), personality (e.g., neu- roticism), cognitive styles (e.g., thought complexity), and social relationships (e.g., honesty) (Pennebaker et al., 2003). Exclusive words (e.g., but, without) are indicative of cognitive complexity. Importantly, Pennebaker was not the first to suggest that words are indicative of psychological states. For example, Freud suggested that the mistakes people make in their speech (i.e., Freudian slips) reveal information about their thoughts, motives, and unconscious conflicts (Pennebaker et al., 2003).

In one study, Pennebaker and his colleagues (Slatcher et al., 2007) compared the linguistic features of the presidential and vice presidential candidates in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Using a linguistic program, they analyzed 271 transcripts of tele- vised interviews, press conferences, and campaign debates that had been aired during the 11 months of 2004 leading up to the election. Specifically, they were interested in linguistic markers of cognitive complexity, femininity, age, depression, presidential- ity, and honesty. They found differences in linguistic style not only across the four individuals but also across political party. For example, not only was Dick Cheney’s language more presidential than that of any of the other three candidates, but Repub- lications’ language was more presidential than that of Democrats. Cheney’s language was also rated as more honest (e.g., higher number of self-references and fewer words conveying negative emotion) and as more cognitively complex. John Edwards and George W. Bush used language that reflected the least amount of cognitive complex- ity, while John Kerry’s linguistic choice was the most depressive. The linguistic analy- sis showed Bush’s to be most reflective of an older individual through its use of fewer first-person references and a great focus on the future (Slatcher et al., 2007).

In another intriguing study, Pennebaker and his colleagues (Pennebaker & Chung, 2009) conducted a linguistic analysis of 58 texts provided by the FBI, 36 of which were au- thored by Osama bin Laden and 17 of which were authored by Ayman al-Zawahiri. The remaining texts were authored by both or it was unknown which of the two created the text. A comparison group of texts from other terrorist leaders was also analyzed. The research- ers used a text analysis program known as the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), which searches written text for over 2300 words or word stems that are then grouped into over 70 linguistic categories. Included among these categories are language categories (e.g., prepositions and pronouns), psychological processes (e.g., positive and negative af- fect; cognitive processes), and content groupings (e.g., home and occupation) (Pennebak- er et al., 2003). The researchers found that, compared to the other terrorist group leaders, bin Laden and Zawahiri used words reflecting more emotion, most notably anger. They also showed more cognitive complexity, but bin Laden surpassed Zawahiri on this dimen- sion. Importantly, bin Laden’s use of exclusive words demonstrating cognitive complexity had increased significantly since 1988. In contrast to bin Laden, Zawahiri’s use of first- person pronouns had increased markedly over the years. Pennebaker and his colleagues interpreted this as indicative of increasing feelings of insecurity and threat. (See Table 2.1 for a summary of all of the results.)

The same linguistic program that was used in the previous two studies was also used in a study that examined the online journal entries of individuals over a four- month period that spanned the two months prior to and the two months after September 11, 2001. Individuals who were the most preoccupied with the events of September 11 showed the greatest psychological change as reflected in their linguistic style. Not surprisingly, the diaries of these high-frequency journal writers evidenced more negative emotion words immediately after 9/11. After about two weeks, how- ever, the proportion of negative emotion words decreased, but the number of social responses (i.e., words referring to other people), which had shown an increase im- mediately following 9/11, decreased over the remainder of the four-month observa- tion period, particularly for those preoccupied with 9/11 (Cohn et al., 2004). Words reflecting greater psychological distancing showed a marked increase following 9/11 compared to before, and this increase remained high for the duration of the study.

CHARACTERISTICS OF GOOD PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH 41

TABLE 2 .1

COmPARISOn OF PuBLIC STATEmEnTS OF BIn LADIn, ZAwAHIRI, AnD OTHER TERRORIST GROuPS Bin Ladin (1988 to 2006) N = 28+ Zawahiri (2003 to 2006) N = 15+ Controls N = 17 P(two-tailed) Word Count 2511.5++ _{1996.4 4767.5}

Big Words (greater than 6 letters) 21.2a+++ 23.6b 21.1a .05

Pronouns 9.15ab 9.83b 8.16a .09

I (e.g., I, me, my) 0.61 0.90 0.83

We (e.g., we, our, us) 1.94 1.79 1.95

You (e.g., you, your, yours) 1.73 1.69 0.87

He/she (e.g., he, hers, they) 1.42 1.42 1.37

They (e.g., they, them) 2.17a 2.29a 1.43b .03

Prepositions 14.8 14.7 15.0

Articles (e.g., a, an, the) 9.07 8.53 9.19

Exclusive Words (but, exclude) 2.72 2.62 3.17

Affect 5.13a 5.12a 3.91b .01

Positive emotion (happy, joy, love) 2.57a 2.83a 2.03b .01

Negative emotion (awful, cry, hate) 2.52a 2.28ab 1.87b .03

Anger words (hate, kill) 1.49a 1.32a .89b .01

Cognitive Mechanisms 4.43 4.56 4.86

Time (clock, hour) 2.40b 1.89a 2.69b .01

Past tense verbs 2.21a 1.63a 2.94b .01

Social Processes 11.4a 10.7ab 9.29b .04

Humans (e.g., child, people, selves) .95ab .52a 1.12b .05

Family (mother, father) .46ab .52a .25b .08

Content

Death (e.g., dead, killing, murder) .55 .47 .64

Achievement .94 .89 .81

Money (e.g., buy, economy, wealth) .34 .38 .58

Religion (e.g., faith, Jew, sacred) 2.41 1.84 1.89

+ _{Documents whose source indicates “Both” (n = 3) or “Unknown” (n = 2) were excluded due to their small sample sizes.}

++ _{Numbers are mean percentages of total words per text file and the results of statistical tests (mean square differnces) between bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and} controls.

+++ _{In any row, mean percentages that differed from each other—on a level of significance indicated in the last coloumn—bear unequal subscripts, a or b. A mean} that is not different from either a or b is subscripted by ab. Means that are not statistically different from each other bear the same subscripts.

Reprinted with permission from Pennebaker, J.W., & Chung, C.K. (2009). Computerized text analysis of Al-Qaeda transcripts. In K. Krippendorff & M.A. Bock (Eds.), A content analysis reader (pp. 453–465). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

All of these studies used the LIWC, (Pennebaker et al., 2001). The program was originally designed to determine which linguistic characteristics best forecast improve- ments in physical and psychological health following traumatic events (Pennebaker et al., 2003). Clearly, however, based on the studies described above, the usefulness of the methodology has spread far beyond its original design.

D E S C R I P T I V E R E S E A R C H

The first major type of research, descriptive research, attempts to describe phenom- ena as they exist rather than to manipulate variables. Do people in different cultures use similar terms to describe people’s personalities, such as outgoing or responsible (McCrae et al., 1998; Paunonen et al., 1992)? Do members of other primate species compete for status and form coalitions against powerful members of the group whose behavior is becoming oppressive? To answer such questions, psychologists use a vari- ety of descriptive methods, including case studies, naturalistic observation, and survey research. Table 2.2 summarizes the major uses and limitations of these descriptive methods as well as the other methods psychologists use.