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Interestingly, the way the women wrote in their final essay modestly predicted whether they were functioning effectively four months later. The two language dimensions that were most closely associated with therapeutic success were:

• a high social-emotional style, which includes use of personal pronouns and emotion words

• a high rate of positive emotion words

The tasks for the women on leaving the therapeutic community were to integrate into new jobs and into a functioning social network. Categorical and dynamic thinking were simply irrelevant dimensions for these women. To survive in their worlds outside prison they needed to be aware of others and themselves. It appears that the social-emotional and optimistic styles they exhibited in their writings were skills that could serve them well on the outside.

IT’S HARD TO imagine two studies more different than the college admissions and therapeutic community projects. Categorical thinking predicts better college grades for one group; social-emotional language predicts lower re-arrest rates in another. Different aspects of language are linked to different parts of our lives.

What I love about these two studies—and, in fact, all of the projects in this book—is that stealth words rearrange themselves in different configurations to predict a broad array of behaviors. For example, using language associated with high social-emotional style can help keep you out of prison and contribute to your being elected president and maybe provide some of the skills needed to write successful top-selling love songs.

Depending on the context, using I-words at high rates may signal insecurity, honesty, and depression proneness but also that you aren’t planning on declaring war any time in the near future. Using I-words at low rates, on the other hand, may get you into college and boost your grade-point average but may hurt your chances of making close friends.

It’s important to return to a theme that has bubbled up several times. The words related to social and psychological states are reflections of those states—not causes. They are telling us what is going on inside people’s heads. The people who use high rates of personal pronouns and emotion words just prior to their release from prison are approaching their writing topic in a social-emotional way. It’s unknown if the treatment program they were immersed in actually pushed them to think social-emotionally. It is also impossible to know if the words in their writing samples directly affected their behaviors once they were released. And it’s even more unlikely that if they had forced themselves to use these words in their essays (thinking it might be good for them) it would have influenced their lives outside the prison gates at all.

We are standing on the threshold of a new world. Think of the many applications that the computer analysis of function words has opened up. By analyzing inaugural speeches or ancestral diaries, we are able to know the influential writers or speakers of our past. We can also start to answer some of the burning psychological questions we have in our everyday lives. We can gain insight into how our online dating prospects view us, distinguish which rap artists are honest about being true gangsters, diagnose if our therapists are just as depressed as we are, or expose which of our colleagues secretly think they are highest in status.

Function words can help us know our worlds just a little better. From author identification that can help in catching criminals or in identifying historical authors, to understanding the thinking of presidents or tyrants, to predicting how people might behave in the future, function words are clues about the human psyche. Most promising, however, is that by looking at our own function words, we can begin to understand ourselves better.

Notes

In addition to the extensive comments and feedback from Cindy Chung, Sam Gosling, and Ruth Pennebaker, a number of other people read all or parts of the manuscript, including David Beaver, Molly Ireland, Jeff Hancock,