The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [135]
110–114 The Giuliani project reference is Pennebaker and Lay (2002).
115 Dan Wegner’s research on thought suppression is ingenious on several levels. Drawing on Tolstoy’s childhood experience, Wegner asked students to not think of a white bear for as little as a minute or two. In doing so, he found that they actually started thinking of bears at high rates. More striking, when students were told that they no longer had to suppress their white bear thoughts, many students reported thinking of white bears at even higher rates. Wegner’s early studies led him to develop a series of important theories about how the mind monitors information.
117–121 A number of investigators are now using blogs and other social media to track the emotional states of large communities of people. For example, Peter Dodds and Christopher Danforth have done this to track happiness, as has Adam Kramer; Bob Kraut, a pioneer of Internet research in psychology, has examined bulletin message boards to track emotional support in online communities; Elizabeth Lyons, Matthias Mehl, and I have analyzed blogs by pro-anorexics to assess their emotional profiles; Markus Wolf, Cindy Chung, and Hans Kordy have analyzed e-mails by psychotherapy patients to their therapists.
122 Over the years, my students and I have studied several large upheavals. Most of this work has attempted to understand how large-scale emotional events unfold over time. To read more about them, see the papers on the Texas A&M bonfire disaster (Gortner and Pennebaker, 2003); the death of Princess Diana (Stone and Pennebaker, 2002); the Loma Prieta earthquake and the Persian Gulf War (Pennebaker and Harber, 1993); and September 11, 2001 (Cohn, Mehl, and Pennebaker, 2004; Mehl and Pennebaker, 2003).
122–123 My colleague Darren Newtson and I traveled around Oregon and Washington for about a month after Mount St. Helens erupted. In towns that had experienced a great deal of damage, we randomly interviewed people by going door-to-door and by making random phone calls. One of the more interesting findings was that the more damage that had been done to a community, the more the residents wanted to talk. Those communities that were close to the volcano but that escaped damage were the most suspicious of outsiders and were least likely to agree to be interviewed. See my earlier book Opening Up for a more detailed account.
123 A particularly promising development in social psychology concerns “affective forecasting.” According to its founders, Dan Gilbert, Tim Wilson, and others, people are remarkably bad at guessing how they will react to a future event. In general, people predict that they will be more distressed about a traumatic experience than they actually would be.
124 Societies frequently adopt well-intentioned interventions that don’t work. In addition to CISD, abstinence-only sex education and D.A.R.E. have generally caused more problems than they solved. See Timothy D. Wilson’s book Redirect.
125 Cindy Chung’s dissertation involved tracking 186 bloggers on a blog community devoted to dieting for one year.
126 Are secrets always toxic? Actually, no. In fact, secrets may be bad but telling others can sometimes be worse. For a wonderful summary of the psychology of secrets, see Anita Kelly’s book and articles.
126–127 The story of Laura was first described in my book Opening Up.
127 People have a powerful urge to talk about emotional events. Bernard Rimé and his colleagues find that people across all cultures typically confide in others for virtually all types of emotional events. One of my favorite findings is