The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [6]
Given the current state of the art, it is little wonder that serious linguists and literary scholars find word-counting programs somewhat distasteful. The thing is, linguists care about language and literary scholars care about literature. And, in my own begrudging way, I care about these things too. But what I’m really interested in is the relationship between word use and people’s psychological states. Can we identify features of language that reveal how people are thinking? And, if so, can we use this information to change their thinking in a beneficial way?
IDENTIFYING HEALTHY WRITING WITH A COMPUTER PROGRAM
The entire purpose of developing LIWC was to see if the ways people wrote about their traumatic experiences could predict later improvements in their health. Put another way, could we use LIWC to identify healthy writing?
During LIWC’s development, several expressive writing studies had been conducted that could answer this question. In my lab, three had been conducted with college students. Others had been run by colleagues who had relied on more diverse samples, including a study of maximum-security prisoners, a group of New Zealand medical students, and a cohort of senior engineers recently laid off from their jobs. Now that we had essays from a wide range of people across six different studies, we could get our computer program to find which word categories were associated with healthy writing. Three important findings emerged.
THE IMPORTANCE OF POSITIVE EMOTIONS
A rough measure of people’s emotional state can be found by counting words in their trauma essays that signify positive emotion (e.g., love, care, happy) and negative emotion (e.g., sad, pain, anger). The results from the six writing studies were somewhat unexpected. Overall, the more people used positive emotions while writing about emotional upheavals, the more their physical and mental health improved in the weeks and months after the experiment.
Negative emotion words showed a different pattern. People whose physical health improved the most from writing used a moderate number of negative emotion words. That is, people who expressed negative emotion language at very high rates did not benefit from writing—almost as if they were awash in their unhappiness. By the same token, those who used very few negative emotion words did not benefit—perhaps a sign that they were not acknowledging the emotional impact of their topic. The emotional findings, then, suggest that to gain the most benefit from writing about life’s traumas, acknowledge the negative but celebrate the positive.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CONSTRUCTING A STORY
One of the exciting aspects of the LIWC program was that we were able to identify word categories that reflected the degree to which people were actively thinking. Two of the cognitive dimensions included insight or self-reflection words (such as think, realize, believe) and another made up of causal words (such as because, effect, rationale). The people whose health improved the most started out using fairly low rates of cognitive words but increased in their use over the four days of writing. It wasn’t the level of cognitive words that was important but the increase from the first to last day. In some ways, use of insight and causal words was necessary for people to construct a coherent story of their trauma. On the first writing session, people would often spill out their experience in a disorganized way. However, as they wrote about it day after day, they began to make sense of it. This greater understanding was partially reflected in the ways they used cognitive words.
These findings suggested that having a coherent story to explain a painful experience was not necessarily as useful as constructing a coherent story. This helped to explain a personal observation that had bothered me for years. When the first writing studies