Lowly words that reveal speakers' secrets

The past few weeks have tossed strange prepositional anomalies in my path. Or perhaps every week does so, but I have just taken to noticing them recently.  The three-year-old who lives nearby likes to announce, “At my birthday, I’m going to…”, or “Can I have that at my birthday?” On the classic rock station, I heard an early 70’s number 1 hit, “A Horse with No Name,” by the group America. Strangest amalgamated preposition you’ll find: “In the desert you can remember your name, ‘cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain”. Forget the triple negative, it’s that “for to” that leaves you wondering how far the exigencies of meter should nudge a songwriter toward agrammaticality. On the street car, I heard a kid announce to his companion, “At least I’m done my homework!” Shouldn’t there be a “with” in there somewhere? And as we gear up for the summer Olympics, I expect to be hearing many, many times broadcasters using the phrase “In an hour from now” (e.g., “We will be poolside for high diving in an hour from now.”) To my ear, though, “in an hour” all by its lonesome can hold up just fine the structure that precedes or follows it. 

But why should anyone care about prepositions? We can make ourselves understood in most conversational contexts even if these small hardly noticeable words are misused, abused, left out, or doubled up. In his new book, The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say about Us, the social psychologist James W. Pennebaker demonstrates quite convincingly that we should care about prepositions and other “function words”. In the preface, he claims, “Pronouns, articles, prepositions, and a handful of other small, stealthy words reveal parts of your personality, thinking style, emotional state, and connections with others. These words… account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of your vocabulary but make up almost 60 percent of the words you use” (p. ix). These words are usually very short: 17 of the top 20 function words in English are three letters or shorter, and they are very hard to learn to use properly in another language after the age of 12. (And, by my count, 30% of those words as presented in Pennebaker’s table [p. 26] are prepositions.)

The author presents studies that have discovered fascinating correlations between high and low usages of particular types of function words and gender, age, personality, and social status. For example, people who use more articles (a, an, the, in English) are likely to be “more organized and emotionally stable”, “more conscientious, more politically conservative, and older” (p. 37). Women use the first-person pronoun “I”, cognitive words (such as understand, know, because, reason), and social words more than men, who use more prepositions and nouns. The use of pronouns most reliably reveals social status. Those higher in status use much fewer “I-words” (I, me, my), more “we-words” (we, us, our) and “you-words” (you, your) (p. 174). Different emotional states are also associated with particular patterns of function word use: positive emotions are linked to greater use of “we” and concrete nouns. Sadness is linked to higher rates of saying or writing “I” and the use of past or future tense verbs. When angry, people use “you,” “he,” “she,” and “they” more, and rely more on the present tense. Pennebaker also discusses efforts at lie detection through linguistic analysis, concluding that we should be skeptical of any analytic process that claims to exhibit greater than about 65% accuracy. However, he does present an interesting table (p. 162) that classifies several words that tend to be associated either with honesty or deception. Later chapters examine the language of leadership, of love, and of group identity, and how computational author identification works. The author also discusses the science of linguistic style matching or verbal mimicking. 

And what of the lowly preposition? Well, it’s not so lowly, it would seem. Prepositions are associated with “complex thinking”. This type of thinking, notes the author, involves “bigger words, longer sentences, and more complicated sentences, often involving prepositions... Prepositions, by the way are glorious language markers. They help to situate an idea in time and space” (p. 296). So, the prepositional anomalies I recorded might reveal a few things. The three-year-old's birthday-themed prepositional "at" likely just reveals that, well, she's three years old. It takes children a long time to acquire skillful usage of the prepositions, even in their first language. I'm guessing that the joyful preposition-dropping declaration on the street car probably would tell a member of Pennebaker's research team that the child is a Canadian. And maybe broadcasters subconsciously achieve a bit more status in the minds of the viewers if they shingle more prepositions than are absolutely necessary into their announcements. As for the group America's "for to" excursion, I haven't a clue what to make of that. I'm willing to bet, though, that Pennebaker and his research team would. A little respect then, for the humble to, of, in, for, with, on that made it onto the top-20 most frequently used words list, and for all those prepositions that didn't. They, and other function words, are telling our secrets. 

Pennebaker, J. W. (2011). The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say about Us. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

Men and Women Write About Each Other

The 2010 meeting of the International Society for Empirical Research in Literature (IGEL, click here) has just come to a close in Utrecht, Holland, organized with consummate skill and thoughtfulness by Frank Hakemulder and a team of able assistants. Amongst the traditions of the Society is to award a prize to the best presentation by a graduate student at each conference. This year the prize goes to Molly Ireland, who works in James Pennebaker's group at the University of Texas at Austin.

Ireland and Pennebaker used the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) system for making computer counts of different kinds of words in texts. They analyzed 2495 transcripts of naturalistic conversations,  found gender differences of usage of function worlds in seven categories. For instance, as compared with men, women used more expressions of the kind "I think …" "I guess …" which might indicate more tentativeness, or more salience of issues of theory of mind.

Ireland and Pennebaker then analyzed dialogue in 108 scripts by 73 scriptwriters. Men and women scriptwriters tended to depict the speech patterns for characters of their own gender more accurately than for characters of the opposite gender, whose speech patterns they tended to make more gender-neutral. Male scriptwriters tended to replicate gender differences in their characters more realistically than female scriptwriters.

These results raise a set of interesting questions. First, should writers study results of this kind, derived from the scientific study of literature? My view is that the the answer is yes. Of course they should.

And now comes the real question, raised by Molly Ireland in her talk at the conference: what then should writers do about this kind of effect? Should they strive for the natural, or should they exaggerate a bit?

My view is that in general writers do well to pay attention to John Keats when, in an early statement of the principle of defamiliarization, he wrote that "poetry should surprise by a fine excess." This goes for prose, too, I think, and even for movie scripts. Conversation in ordinary life functions to maintain and develop the relationship between the conversants. Dialogue in fiction is quite different. It has the function, first, of taking forward the story, second of delineating character, and third of building a relationship with the reader or viewer. If gender is important in this second function—delineation of character—which it very often is, then emphasizing differences by means of a "fine excess" may probably be what a writer should think of doing.

Molly E. Ireland & James W. Pennebaker (2010) Do authors have an ear for the opposite sex? Presentation at the meeting of the International Society for Empirical Research in Literature, Utrecht, Holland, 7-11 July.

Image: Academiegebouw, University of Utrecht

Benfits of Personal Writing by Jordan Peterson

Several years ago, James Pennebaker had students write for 15 minutes a day, over three days, about the most upsetting experience of their lives, while a control group wrote about their daily activities. Those who wrote about the upsetting experience were found to have medium to long-term improvements in their psychological and physical health, after a brief dip in mood. Pennebaker (1997) has summarized this work. Laura King (2001) had participants write about their ideals and future goals, instead of the past, and her subjects obtained the same benefits.  For different reasons, Edwin Locke and Gary Latham examined the consequences of personal goal setting programs in industrial and organizational settings. Such programs have been found to enhance individual productivity by more than 10% and their work is discussed in detail in their 2013 book.

For these reasons, and others, with a group of other scientists, I have developed programs designed to step people through the process of articulating their past experiences (Past Authoring), current personality structure, faults, and virtues (Present Authoring), and visions for the future (Future Authoring). 

The Past Authoring program asks participants to break their lives down into seven epochs, to identify and write briefly about six significant experiences in each epoch and, finally, to choose and write in detail about their ten most crucially important lifetime experiences. 

The Present Authoring programs use the Big Five personality model to help participants identify their personality faults and weaknesses, by selecting self-representative adjectives from lists of negative or positive traits; by writing about memories associated with those adjectives; and by engaging in strategic planning about how the faults or virtues could be rectified or capitalized on, respectively, now and in the future.

The Future Authoring program asks participants to consider people they admire, and to think about important life domains such as relationships, career goals, educational aspirations, use of drugs and alcohol, non-career activities, and health, before writing for 15-20 minutes about the future they believe would be best for them, as well as the negative future that might occur if their bad habits ran out of control. After that, participants are asked to step themselves through a nine-part process designed to help turn the vision created in part one into an implementable and well-thought through plan.

We tested the effect of the Future Authoring at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Holland. Academically struggling students at McGill increased their grades by 25%, and decreased their drop-out rates from 30% to zero. At Erasmus University, 1200 business students experienced the same results, increasing their academic performance by 25%, and decreasing their dropout rate by 30%. We think that participants benefit because the careful specification of future goals increases positive emotion, which is generally experienced when progress towards valued goals is observed, and decreases negative emotion, which is heightened when the meaning of past, present and future events remains unspecified and uncertain, in a way that I have written about in my 1999 book Maps of meaning.
 

If you would like to know more about personal writing and the programs my colleagues and I have developed to help structure it, please e-mail me at jordanbpeterson [at] gmail.com

King, L. A. (2001). The health benefits of writing about life goals. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 798-807.

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (Eds.). (2013). New developments in goal setting and performance. New York: Routledge.

Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8, 162-166.

Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief. London: Routledge.

 

Research Bulletin: The Writer’s Fingerprint

A recent BBC article described a study by Sebastian Bernhardsson (2009) and colleagues, in which they examined how the number of unique words (appearing only once) in a text relates to how long the overall text is. While it should go without saying that a longer text is likely to have more unique words than a shorter text, the relationship between the number of such words and the length of the text turns out to differ by author. Bernhardsson and colleagues (2009) examined various works of different length by Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, and D. H. Lawrence. What they found was that each author produced a unique curve that could be seen as a sort of finger-print for that author. Moreover, this curve appeared consistent across works, and works of different lengths, leading the researchers to conclude that whenever writers create a work they are pulling from a hypothetical “meta-book,” that encompasses their style.

While it would be nice to see this work replicated, using a greater corpus of authors, the idea that a writer’s style can be quantified using relatively simple word-count techniques is not a new one. Jamie Pennebaker, for example, has demonstrated that language use is an individual difference that can be used to predict a wide variety of things, including health outcomes and personality (e.g., Pennebaker & Graybeal, 2001). That our style of writing reflects something innate to our self and being, in a very real way, probably comes as no surprise to those of us who write. It is comforting, however, that this is not mere intuition but a phenomenon profound enough in magnitude to be detected using relatively crude research methods. It would be interesting to examine how a person’s writing style changes, and how these changes might reflect changes in the individual as a result of personal growth or encounters with unfortunate happenstance.

Bernhardsson, S., Correa da Rocha, L. E., & Minnhagen, P. (2009). The meta book and size-dependent properties of written language. New Journal of Physics, 11, 123015. (Online journal)

Pennebaker, J. W., & Graybeal, A. (2001). Patterns of natural language use: Disclosure, Personality, and Social Integration. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 90-93.

Research Bulletin: Writing can improve relationships

In a recent study, Eli Finkel and his colleagues (2013) have found that writing to re-appraise conflicts with spouses, improves the quality of marital relationships. Participants in the study were 120 married couples who lived in the Chicago area, who answered an advertisement. At the beginning of the study they completed an internet survey and also came for a laboratory visit for a study that was different from the current one. At that time, and at four-month intervals for two years, they completed an internet questionnaire that contained six single-item scales: of relationship satisfaction, love, intimacy, trust, passion, and commitment. For instance the relationship satisfaction question was "I feel satisfied with our relationship." It was scored 1 "strongly agree" to 7 "strongly disagree." The combined scores on these six scales gave an index of subjective marital quality. At month four, and then every four months (with all data being collected entirely by internet), both members of all the couples were asked to write a “'fact-based summary of the most significant disagreement' they had experienced with their spouse over the preceding four months, 'focusing on behavior, not on thoughts or feelings.'”

At 12 months, half the couples were randomly assigned to a condition in which, after they had written the fact-based summary of their disagreement, they were to write for seven minutes to reappraise this summary by thinking about it as if it were seen by a third party, from a neutral point of view. Every time they started this seven-minute reappraisal they were given three prompts. In the first prompt they were asked to think of this neutral third party as someone who wanted the best for all involved, and who tried to think what good might come from the disagreement. In the second prompt, they were told that some people find it helpful to take this third-person point of view during disagreements with the partner, and to think what obstacles they faced in taking this point of view during a disagreement. In the third prompt, they were told that although there are obstacles to taking this third-person point of view, they should nonetheless try to take it during disagreements, to think how they could succeed in doing this, and to think how taking it might make the best of disagreements.

Over the first part of the study (0 to 12 months) there was a steady downward trend in the average of the six-item measure of marital quality for all the couples. This is a normal finding, since marital quality tends generally to decline from the time of marriage until children leave home. At 16, 20, and 24 months, the downward trend of marital quality stopped for the couples who had the writing assignment to reappraise a conflict by thinking about it from the point of view of a third party, and the encouragement to use this point of view during disagreements. This cessation of the graph's downward slope was significantly different from the graph of the control couples who had not been asked to do the reappraisal assignment and had not been given prompts. Their graph continued downwards, with no change of direction, until the end of the study at 24 months.

This fascinating study recalls the benefits to the functioning of the body’s immune system of writing about a significant emotional episode by Pennebaker (e.g. Pennebaker & Chung, 2011) Perhaps marriage is part of a social immune system, so that writing thoughtfully about it can improve its function.

Finkel, E. J., Slotter, E. B., Luchies, L. B., Walton, G. M., & Gross, J. J. (2013). A brief intervention to promote conflict reapprasial preserves marital quality over time. Psychological Science, in press.

Pennebaker, J. W., & Chung, C. K. (2011). Expressive writing: Connections to mental and physical health. In H. S. Friedman (Ed.), Oxford handbook of health psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Image: The best time of day blog, accessed 17 March 2013

Book Review: The Psychology of Creative Writing

The book I am reviewing today is not a handbook—at least the title does not indicate that it is such. However, The Psychology of Creative Writing, edited by two accomplished psychologists interested in creativity, Scott Barry Kaufman and James C. Kaufman, functions like one. Granted, handbooks in psychology tend to run between 600 and 800 pages, while this tome runs to only 370, although A Handbook of Wisdom: Psychological Perspectives, also published by Cambridge, has only 368 pages of text, and the editors had either the audacity—or the wisdom—to call it a handbook. The point here is that I have found in the year since I acquired this book that I have consulted it many times, as I would a handbook. I’ve read articles, consulted and reconsulted references, and kept it closer to my desk than other works on the psychology of creative writing. That’s what I would call a handbook.

This rich collection of papers by (mostly) psychologists who research creative writing from a great variety of perspectives offers major sections on the writer, text, process, development, and education. The section on the writer treats creative writers’ personalities, psychopathologies, mood variability and regulation among student journalists and creative writers, screenwriters’ psychological characteristics, and personality, intelligence and self-monitoring in comedy writers. All of the papers in this section are strong, but I found particularly interesting Adèle Kohányi’s discussion of her finding that both student creative writers and student journalists experienced lower mood variability than non-writers across a 14-day period of recording their emotions and their intensities. Her discussion is detailed, balanced, and the literature review is excellent.

The next section, the briefest, is on the text and includes papers on the evolution of creative writing, literary creativity and physiognomy, and Shakespeare’s developing creativity as evidenced in a close analysis of the language of the plays and sonnets. Examining creative writing from an expert performance perspective, Dean Keith Simonton empirically demonstrates that, across Shakespeare’s career, he used less archaic and more colloquial words and expressions. Simonton sees this as the playwright’s drive toward originality. He shows that it is possible to predict a play’s date from stylistic qualities, and popularity is greater for those sonnets that treat a distinctive theme, employ a large number of varied words-to-total words ratio, more adjectives, more “primary process imagery” (p. 138), and use more common words in the latter part of the sonnet. Finally, he examines the question of Shakespearian authorship of those works attributed to the bard. This is the sort of exemplary article you’d want to assign to a research methodology class in either psychology or English.

The section on the writing process examines stages and processes of creative writing, distributed cognition in writing, writing as a vehicle for self-expression and problem resolution, and the writing of science fiction and fantasy from a cognitive science perspective. I particularly enjoyed this last chapter in the section. Thomas B. Ward and Thomas Lawson take a “creative cognition approach” in which their objective is to examine how the retrieval of knowledge at different levels of specificity and abstraction contribute to the believability of the fiction and quality of the reader’s processing of science-fictional worlds. Breadth of both specific and abstract levels of knowledge allow the writer to escape the “path-of-least-resistance” phenomenon, in which individuals “retrieve and use highly specific, basic-level instances of stored concepts when they create novel ideas within conceptual domains” (p. 198). They also explore concept combination, in which two concepts not previously joined in the mind of the writer, and likely the reader, are joined to great effect. On the whole, I found their points concerning knowledge-based constraints on writing convincing and well argued; they also happen to cite a book chapter with one of the more amusing titles around: “First sew on a tentacle (recipes for believable aliens)”. . .

The papers in the section on development address flow in writing, the use of imagery to enhance creativity, relationships among pretend play, emotional processes and creative writing, and the health benefits of expressive writing. In this last chapter, Janel D. Sexton and James W. Pennebaker review much of the research paradigm undertaken by Pennebaker and colleagues since the 1980’s. The intervention used is simple: ask participants to focus on and write about a traumatic event they have experienced. The health benefits shown to follow this and variations on this intervention have been noteworthy: less doctor visits, reports of greater well-being, stronger immune functioning, reduced symptoms and medication use, improved self-image, reduced depression, and the list goes on. This line of research has also established that certain usages of language are linked to health and others not. For example, users of the pronoun “I” more often than others, tend to be less healthy and more depressed. This chapter doesn’t really address creative writing, if one takes the phrase to mean the writing of fiction, plays, screenplays, and poetry. The authors do cite an older study that showed benefits to those who wrote about an imaginary trauma, and a more recent study addressing one’s writing about one’s own best possible self. Granted, these are forms of writing based upon one’s imagination of non-existent entities, but that’s not the kind of creative writing that most of this collection is about. To my knowledge, there has been no study of what a structured fiction-writing exercise based in part on Pennebaker’s intervention might achieve in health benefits. Such studies would make an important contribution to theory in the psychology of creative writing and would likely have useful practical applications as well.

I began reading the last section, on education, with somewhat lowered expectations. Sometimes, in addressing the educational aspect of a field of psychology, theory exposition becomes imprecise and empirical work is not as detailed as it might be. This education section is refreshing. The theory is substantial and nuanced and the reports of empirical work rigorous in chapters on how rewards undermine creativity, the influence of the writer’s belief on the development of the writer’s persona, and the importance of the teacher’s response and evaluative techniques on student writing success. The concluding chapter, on instructing adolescents in the identification and production of creative metaphor among Chinese learners, is particularly strong empirically, and makes an important contribution to the field of creative metaphor pedagogy.

I learned a lot from this book. Upon reflection, it seems to me that the only thing missing here that one usually finds in handbooks is a chapter on the history of the development of the subfield at issue. However, although there is a substantial psychological literature on creative processes across domains, and on creative writing in disciplines other than psychology, the science of psychology has only very recently (in the last 15 years) turned its methods and tools to the process of creative writing. It is an exciting time to be working in this area, and this volume a good one to have at hand.

Kaufman, S. B., & Kaufman, J. C. (2009). The psychology of creative writing. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Announcing A New Journal

An exciting announcement was made at the recent IGEL conference in Utrecht. (We have been enjoying some wonderful essays over the past few weeks from the "Stillness Contest" also presented at this meeting.) The society has decided to launch its own journal, entitled the Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL), publishing the very best empirical work on literature. Willie van Peer will act as head editor, working alongside Max Louwerse, Joan Peskin, and myself, as associate editors. Together we have assembled a very impressive review editorial board, which includes OnFiction's own Keith Oatley, along with some other names that might sound familiar to our readers (e.g., Steven Pinker, James Pennebaker). Below is a brief description of the journal from our publisher, John Benjamins:

Literature has an important role in human culture. Broadly interpreted, literature is defined as all cultural artefacts that make use of literary devices, such as narrativity, metaphoricity, symbolism. Its manifestations include novels, short stories, poetry, theatre, film, television, and, more recently, digital forms such as hypertext storytelling. This new journal, Scientific Study of Literature (SSOL), will publish empirical studies that apply scientific stringency to cast light on the structure and function of literary phenomena. The journal welcomes contributions from many disciplinary perspectives (psychological, developmental, cross-cultural, cognitive, neuroscience, computational, and educational) to deepen our understanding of literature, literary processes, and literary applications.

Our first issue should appear mid-2011, and will include a number of short pieces from leaders in the field with their thoughts on the future of the empirical study of literature. It promises to be an exciting collection. Members of IGEL receive the journal for free, so if you are interested in these topics please consider becoming a member of this society. More importantly, if you are a researcher, please consider submitting something to our new journal!

Wired For Story

Lisa Cron, a reader of OnFiction, has worked in publishing at W.W. Norton and more recently as a TV producer and screenwriting consultant. Her informally-written book, called Wired For Story, is unusual in that it offers advice about writing stories that draws on modern cognitive psychology and neuroscience. As you may gather from her subtitle The writer's guide to using brain science to hook readers from the very first sentence, Lisa Cron's idea is an ambitious one.

The research literature on which Cron draws will probably be familiar to readers of OnFiction. It includes work by Brian Boyd, Michael Gazzaniga, Steven Pinker, Antonio Damasio, Jamie Pennebaker, and even members of the OnFiction team. Cron's basic idea is that although story is an indigenous mode of thinking for us human beings, writers have to work hard to engage this mode fully in potential readers. Writers will be successful, she argues, by knowing some principles of cognitive psychology and brain science. Each chapter opens with the announcement of what Cron calls a "Cognitive Secret" and a "Story Secret." For chapter 1 these are, respectively: "We think in story which allows us to envision the future," and "From the very first sentence, the reader must want to know what happens next." For chapter 2 the Cognitive Secret is "When the brain focuses its full attention on something, it filters out all unnecessary information" and the Story Secret is "To hold the brain's attention, everything must be there on a need-to-know basis." For chapter 3, the Cognitive Secret is "Emotion determines the meaning of everything—if we're not feeling we're not conscious," and the Story Secret is "All story is emotion based—if we're not feeling we're not reading." After its opening announcements,  each chapter is then devoted to drawing on the relevant research, unpacking the concepts, and to showing how they can be applied to the craft of writing.

In my own fiction writing I certainly use what I know of cognitive psychology and brain science, so to me it makes sense to offer a book that gives writers relevant ideas in these areas. Some of the issues that are covered, for instance the importance of re-writing, are familiar to readers of how-to books on writing, but Cron comes at issues from an angle that is fresh and different from that of most such books. One feature I particularly like is a check-list in most of the chapters. Chapter 9 is entitled "What can go wrong must go wrong, and then some," and its Cognitive Secret is: "The brain uses stories to simulate how we might navigate difficult situations in the future." One of the points in the checklist for this chapter is: "Have you exposed your protagonist's … most guarded flaws?" Now there's an interesting question for a writer of a novel or screenplay.

This book is informative, thought-provoking, and helpful.

Lisa Cron (2012). Wired for story: The writer's guide to using brain science to hook readers from the very first sentence. Berkeley, CA. Ten Speed Press.