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By Root 963 0

were published, my work was often featured in the media. At cocktail parties or informal gatherings, I sometimes found myself to be a trauma magnet. People who knew about my research would gravitate to me in order to tell me all about their horrific life experiences. Many of them also were in very poor physical health. At first, I thought that their talking about their stories would be good for them. However, I’d see the same people at another gathering months later and they would often tell me exactly the same stories and their health would be unchanged.

The word count research revealed the problem. The people telling their traumatic stories were essentially telling the same stories over and over. There was no change to the stories, no growth, no increase in understanding. Repeating the same story in the same way is not unlike ruminative thinking—a classic symptom of depression.

There is an important lesson here. If haunted by an emotional upheaval in your life, try writing about it or sharing the experience with others. However, if you catch yourself telling exactly the same story over and over in order to get past your distress, rethink your strategy. Try writing or talking about your trauma in a completely different way. How would a more detached narrator describe what happened? What other ways of explaining the event might exist? If you’re successful, research studies suggest that you will sleep better, experience better physical health, and notice yourself feeling happier and less overcome by your upheaval.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CHANGING PERSPECTIVES

Thanks to the LIWC program, we found that three aspects of emotional writing predicted improvements in people’s physical and mental health: accentuating the positive parts of an upheaval, acknowledging the negative parts, and constructing a story over the days of writing. More complex analyses soon revealed another dimension of word use that no one had seen before.

In the 1990s, a group of researchers at the University of Colorado introduced a computer program called Latent Semantic Analysis (or LSA) that could track patterns of word use both within and across different essays. The beauty of LSA was that it could mathematically compare how similar any two writing samples were. On the surface, then, we could determine if people who wrote about the same topics from day to day might benefit more than those who wrote about different topics. It was a grand idea, but try as we might, we couldn’t find any good evidence to support it.

One of my graduate students, Sherlock Campbell, had spent almost a year getting the LSA program to work. The more he and I thought about the LSA project, the more we realized that we had been thinking about language the wrong way. Instead of analyzing the content of what people were writing, why not analyze their language style? To do this, we needed to turn the LSA program on its head. Instead of analyzing the content of the essays by focusing on nouns, regular verbs, and adjectives, we asked the program to focus on the words that revealed writing style. Writing style, we were learning, was generally revealed through function words, including pronouns, prepositions, articles, and a small number of similar short but common words.

The results were breathtaking. (OK, if you are not a computational linguist, “breathtaking” may be a bit of an overstatement. You had to be there.) The more people changed in the ways they used function words from writing to writing, the more their health later improved. As we started to focus on different classes of function words, one particular group of culprits stood out as more important than the others: personal pronouns. More specifically, the more people changed in their use of first-person singular pronouns (e.g., I, me, my) compared with other pronouns (e.g., we, you, she, they), the better their health later became. The effects were large and held up for study after study.

After spending over a year on the computer program, Sherlock was thrilled. He took great pride in noting that we had discovered the