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67 In the last twenty years, research on social class and physical health has ballooned within the United States. Some excellent articles on the topic include papers by Edith Chen, Karen Matthews, and Thomas Boyce as well as a classic by Nancy Adler and her colleagues.

68–70 There have been virtually no scientifically sound studies tracking natural language use in the home among people of differing social classes. The Hart and Risley study is promising, as is an earlier one by Brandis and Henderson in 1970.

CHAPTER 4: PERSONALITY: FINDING THE PERSON WITHIN

76–82 Most of the initial work on personality and language was the result of a collaboration with Laura King. You can see the actual analyses by reading the Pennebaker and King (1999) paper. A number of people have expanded on this work, especially in how language is related to self-reported personality. Two great projects have been published, one by Francois Mairesse and colleagues and another by Tal Yarkoni. Psychologists Lisa Fast and David Funder, as well as Matthias Mehl, Sam Gosling, and I, have published on word use and personality. See also the creative work of Jon Oberlander, Alastair Gill, and Scott Nowson.

85–90 Cindy Chung’s insight into the Meaning Extraction Method, or MEM, is now being used by labs around the world. It essentially allows researchers to extract themes from text automatically. One of the slickest applications is in pulling out themes written in different languages. For example, we can have the computer analyze thousands of blogs in, say, Finnish. Using the MEM, we can pull out several themes that are popular in Finnish blogs. All we have to do at the end of the project is to find someone who speaks Finnish so that he or she can tell us what we have discovered. The first MEM paper was by Chung and Pennebaker (2008).

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