The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [8]
The findings may sound esoteric but in real life they aren’t. The writings of those whose health improved showed a high rate of the use of I-words on one occasion and then high rates of the use of other pronouns on the next occasion, and then switching back and forth in subsequent writings. In other words, healthy people say something about their own thoughts and feelings in one instance and then explore what is happening with other people before writing about themselves again.
This perspective switching is actually quite common in psychotherapy. If a man visits his therapist and begins repeatedly complaining about his wife’s behavior, what she says, how aloof she is, and so forth, the therapist will likely stop the client after several minutes and say, “You’ve been talking about your wife at length but you haven’t said anything about yourself. How do you feel when this happens?” Similarly, if another client—a woman in this case—with marital problems sees her therapist and spends most of her time talking about her own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors without ever talking about her spouse, the therapist will probably redirect the conversation in a similar way by asking, “You’ve told me a lot about your own feelings when this happens—how do you think your husband feels about this?” Perhaps like good therapy, healthy writing may involve looking at a problem from multiple perspectives.
WORDS AS MIRRORS, WORDS AS TOOLS
Stand back for a minute and consider the meaning of all of our findings regarding expressive writing. Writing about emotional upheavals can improve people’s mental and physical health. Not all people benefit from this exercise however. Those who do benefit tend to write differently from those who don’t. Healthy writing involves positive emotion words, a moderate use of negative emotion words, increasing use of cognitive words, and changes in pronoun use. Translating these effects into everyday language: People who benefit from writing express more optimism, acknowledge negative events, are constructing a meaningful story of their experience, and have the ability to change perspectives as they write.
Most surprising, though, was that these discoveries were reflected through people’s use of a small number of almost-invisible stealth words. The stealth words, which had been there all along, reflected critical changes in the ways people were thinking.
These language findings are certainly interesting, but can we put them to good use? If we bring people into the lab and encourage them to use positive emotion words, increase their use of cognitive words, and oscillate in their use of personal pronouns while they write, will their health improve? In other words, do words reflect a psychological state or do they cause it?
Over the years, several studies have been conducted to try to answer this question. In one elaborate experiment, Cheryl Hughes, a former student of mine at Southern Methodist University, gave different students lists of words that she asked them to use in their expressive writing. Some received lists of positive emotion words, others received negative emotion words, some were given cognitive word lists and others weren’t. While she succeeded in manipulating the words people used in the predicted directions, the writing had no effect on health. Other clever attempts have been made to get people to change the rates at which they use cognitive words or to change the types of pronouns from writing to writing while addressing emotional topics. The current evidence is convincing: Word use generally reflects psychological state rather than influences or causes it.
That words we use mirror our thoughts and feelings is not a startling revelation. But the findings point to ways we can now use word analyses to change people’s thinking. Recall that healthy writing is characterized by an increasing use of words such as because, cause, effect, reason, and related cognitive words. Simply requiring people to use the words