The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [132]
10–12 The findings concerning positive emotions, negative emotions, and change in cognitive words were first published in Pennebaker, Mayne, and Francis in 1997. See also Moore and Brody (2009) and Graham, Glaser, Loving, Malarkey, Stowell, and Kiecolt-Glaser (2009).
12–13 The findings on pronouns and changing perspectives were based on an article by Sherlock Campbell and me, published in 2003.
13 One of the more interesting discoveries about expressive writing was reported in an important paper by Youngsuk Kim. In her expressive writing project, bilingual Korean-English and Spanish-English students wrote either in their native language, second language, or both. Youngsuk had all participants wear a portable tape recorder for two days prior to writing and, again, a month after the writing experiment. Compared to people who did not write, participants who wrote about emotional upheavals spent more time with others, talked more, and laughed more. Although the effects were modest, those who wrote in both their native and learned languages tended to benefit the most.
14 Cheryl Hughes and Martha Francis were the first two students to earn doctoral degrees in psychology at Southern Methodist University. The results of Hughes’s attempts to change people’s thinking by influencing their word choice were the basis of her doctoral dissertation in 1994. More recently, Yi-Tai Seih, Cindy Chung, and I asked people to write in either the first person (as if they were simply describing their experience), second person (as if they were talking into a mirror), or third person (as if they were watching themselves in a movie) in their expressive writing. In another study, people were asked to change perspectives from essay to essay. To our surprise, people reported that writing in any perspective was helpful, as was switching perspectives. Our current thinking is that enforced perspective switching is probably good for some people and not others. Not the kind of groundbreaking conclusion we were looking for.
CHAPTER 2: IGNORING THE CONTENT, CELEBRATING THE STYLE
19 The drawing is from the Thematic Apperception Test by Henry A. Murray, Card 12F, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
20 Throughout this book, I include quotations from people who have been in my studies or classes, from text on the Internet, or even from conversations or e-mails from friends or family members. In all cases, all identifying information has been removed or altered.
22 In this book, the terms style, function, and stealth words are used interchangeably. They have many other names as well—junk words, particles, and closed-class words. Linguists tend to disagree about the precise definitions of each of these overlapping terms.
26 The table of function word usage rate is based on analyses from our own data representing language samples from over two thousand conversations, two hundred novels, twenty thousand blogs, and thousands of college student and adult writing samples. For more information, see Pennebaker, Chung, Ireland, Gonzales, and Booth (2007).
28 Political campaigns are wonderful to analyze. Presidential candidates are under the spotlight most every day, whether giving speeches, doing interviews, or simply talking with people on the street. Most of their words are transcribed, making it easy for text analysis experts to track language over the course of the campaign. For some analyses of the 2004 presidential election, see an article by Rich Slatcher, Cindy Chung, Lori Stone, and me. You might also be interested in a site that David Beaver (a linguist from the University of Texas), Art Graesser (cognitive scientist, University of Memphis), Jeff Hancock (communications expert, Cornell), and I have created devoted to political issues, www.wordwatchers.wordpress.com.
29 One of the finest books that discuss the roles of the brain and language is George Miller’s The Science of Words. It is the perfect introduction to the topic for someone