The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [58]
Writing is not a panacea and its effects are limited. For example, there is no evidence that writing about an emotional upheaval immediately after it occurs is helpful. Although writing for a relatively brief time over a few days has generally worked, it is unclear that long-term diary writing is necessarily helpful. In fact, writing too much about a particular problem may be a form of rumination. My recommendation is if you are interested in expressive writing, try it out for a few days. If it is beneficial, great. If not, try something else.
TYING IT TOGETHER: EMOTIONS AND THINKING STYLES AS TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN
Remember Rex Ryan, the coach of the New York Jets football team who cried in front of his players after losing an important game? His emotional display reflected a change in the ways he was thinking about his team and its potential. Equally important, his tears were a powerful social signal to the players. You will recall that one of his players was quoted as being impressed by the coach’s commitment to the team and how his crying brought the team together. In a separate article, the same crying scenario signaled to a sportswriter that the New York Jets were falling apart.
Emotions are not just reactions to events. Different emotions can change the ways we think and influence how we respond to others. Emotions are intensely social in that they can draw us closer or push us farther apart. Emotions are also meaningful signals about other people’s motivations, goals, and intentions. The intimate connection between function words and emotional state naturally follows. Emotions make us think about the world differently and function words reflect this change in thinking.
The relationship between thoughts and feelings has been the subject of heated debate in philosophy and psychology for centuries. Both Aristotle and Plato argued that logic and emotions were fundamentally different processes. Descartes, writing in the seventeenth century, went farther by claiming that emotions undermined people’s abilities to think rationally. The early American psychologist William James also emphasized how emotions and passions frequently blinded people’s judgments. Sigmund Freud argued that fundamental emotional issues were the driving force of personality and behavior.
We are now beginning to think very differently about emotions and reason due, in part, to discoveries in the brain sciences. One of the most eloquent spokesmen for this new perspective is Antonio R. Damasio, a neuroscientist who has studied and written about the behaviors of people who suffer damage to the frontal lobe of the brain. The frontal lobe integrates information from primal emotional centers as well as regions associated with abstract reasoning and language. Many of the connections are so extensive that it makes no sense to make a sharp distinction between emotions and thoughts.
In his book Descartes’ Error, Damasio describes a procedure whereby people play a competitive card game. Healthy people with no brain damage are highly sensitive to rewards and punishments in making their decisions. Those with damage to their frontal lobes, however, seem to ignore the feelings they get from failure. He concludes that the emotions associated with losing help people to behave more rationally. Emotions inform thoughts.
That our feelings affect the ways we think about the world is the take-home message of this chapter. Our emotions influence our thinking, which is reflected in the ways we use function words. By extension, function words can give us a sense of how other people are thinking and feeling. They also serve as subtle public announcements alerting others to our own emotional states, our thinking patterns, and where we are paying attention.
CHAPTER 6
Lying Words
LIE DETECTION EXPERTS have always known that lying is associated with