TED talks are a popular internet forum where new ideas and research are presented by a wide variety of speakers. In this study, we investigated how the language used in TED talks influenced ...popularity and viewer ratings. We also investigated the differences in linguistic style and ratings of talks given by academics and non‐academics. The transcripts of 1866 talks were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program and eight language variables were correlated with number of views and viewer ratings. We found that talks with more analytic language received fewer views, while a greater use of the pronoun “I,” positive emotion and social words was associated with more views. Talks with these linguistic characteristics received more emotional viewer ratings such as inspiring or courageous. When comparing talks by academics and non‐academics, there was no difference in the overall popularity but viewers rated talks by academics as more fascinating, informative, and persuasive while non‐academics received higher emotional ratings. The implications for understanding social influence processes are discussed.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK, VSZLJ
Telling lies often requires creating a story about an experience or attitude that does not exist. As a result, false stories may be qualitatively different from true stories. The current project ...investigated the features of linguistic style that distinguish between true and false stories. In an analysis of five independent samples, a computer-based text analysis program correctly classified liars and truth-tellers at a rate of 67% when the topic was constant and a rate of 61% overall. Compared to truth-tellers, liars showed lower cognitive complexity, used fewer self-references and other-references, and used more negative emotion words.
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Web-based methodologies may provide a new and unique insight into public response to an infectious disease outbreak. This naturalistic study investigates the effectiveness of new web-based ...methodologies in assessing anxiety and information seeking in response to the 2009 H1N1 outbreak by examining language use in weblogs ("blogs"), newspaper articles, and web-based information seeking. Language use in blogs and newspaper articles was assessed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, and information seeking was examined using the number of daily visits to H1N1-relevant Wikipedia articles. The results show that blogs mentioning "swine flu" used significantly higher levels of anxiety, health, and death words and lower levels of positive emotion words than control blogs. Change in language use on blogs was strongly related to change in language use in newspaper coverage for the same day. Both the measure of anxiety in blogs mentioning "swine flu" and the number of Wikipedia visits followed similar trajectories, peaking shortly after the announcement of H1N1 and then declining rapidly. Anxiety measured in blogs preceded information seeking on Wikipedia. These results show that the public reaction to H1N1 was rapid and short-lived. This research suggests that analysis of web behavior can provide a source of naturalistic data on the level and changing pattern of public anxiety and information seeking following the outbreak of a public health emergency.
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Among both laypersons and researchers, extensive use of first-person singular pronouns (i.e., I-talk) is considered a face-valid linguistic marker of narcissism. However, the assumed relation between ...narcissism and I-talk has yet to be subjected to a strong empirical test. Accordingly, we conducted a large-scale (N = 4,811), multisite (5 labs), multimeasure (5 narcissism measures) and dual-language (English and German) investigation to quantify how strongly narcissism is related to using more first-person singular pronouns across different theoretically relevant communication contexts (identity-related, personal, impersonal, private, public, and stream-of-consciousness tasks). Overall (r = .01, 95% CI −.02, .04) and within the sampled contexts, narcissism was unrelated to use of first-person singular pronouns (total, subjective, objective, and possessive). This consistent near-zero effect has important implications for making inferences about narcissism from pronoun use and prompts questions about why I-talk tends to be strongly perceived as an indicator of narcissism in the absence of an underlying actual association between the 2 variables.
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To explore the publicised opinions of consumers actively participating in online hearing aid reviews.
A retrospective design examining data generated from an online consumer review website (
...www.HearingTracker.com
). Qualitative data (open text responses) were analysed using the open source automated topic modelling software IRaMuTeQ (
http://www.iramuteq.org/
) to identify themes. Outputs were compared with quantitative data from the consumer reviews (short response questions exploring hearing aid performance and benefit, and some meta-data such as hearing aid brand and years of hearing aid ownership).
1378 online consumer hearing aid reviews.
Six clusters within two domains were identified. The domain Device Acquisition included three clusters: Finding the right provider, device and price-point; Selecting a hearing aid to suit the hearing loss; Attaining physical fit and device management skills. The domain Device Use included three clusters: Smartphone streaming to hearing aids; Hearing aid adjustment using smartphone; and Hearing in noise.
Although online hearing aid consumers indicate positive performance on multiple-choice questions relating to hearing aid performance and benefit, their online reviews describe a number of barriers limiting their success. Hearing healthcare clinicians must employ a personalised approach to audiological rehabilitation to ensure individual clients' needs are met.
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Essays written by currently-depressed, formerly-depressed, and never-depressed college students were examined for differences in language that might shed light on the cognitive operations associated ...with depression and depression-vulnerability. A text analysis program computed the incidence of words in predesignated categories. Consistent with Beck's cognitive model and with Pyczsinski and Greenberg's self-focus model of depression, depressed participants used more negatively valenced words and used the word, "I" more than did never-depressed participants. Formerly-depressed (presumably depression-vulnerable) participants did not differ from never-depressed participants on these indices of depressive processing. However, consistent with prediction, formerly-depressed participants' use of the word "I" increased across the essays and was significantly greater than that of never-depressed writers in the final portion of the essays.
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To what degree can we determine people's connections with groups through the language they use? In recent years, large archives of behavioral data from social media communities have become available ...to social scientists, opening the possibility of tracking naturally occurring group identity processes. A feature of most digital groups is that they rely exclusively on the written word. Across 3 studies, we developed and validated a language-based metric of group identity strength and demonstrated its potential in tracking identity processes in online communities. In Studies 1a-1c, 873 people wrote about their connections to various groups (country, college, or religion). A total of 2 language markers of group identity strength were found: high affiliation (more words like
) and low cognitive processing or questioning (fewer words like
). Using these markers, a language-based unquestioning affiliation index was developed and applied to in-class stream-of-consciousness essays of 2,161 college students (Study 2). Greater levels of unquestioning affiliation expressed in language predicted not only self-reported university identity but also students' likelihood of remaining enrolled in college a year later. In Study 3, the index was applied to naturalistic Reddit conversations of 270,784 people in 2 online communities of supporters of the 2016 presidential candidates-Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The index predicted how long people would remain in the group (3a) and revealed temporal shifts mirroring members' joining and leaving of groups (3b). Together, the studies highlight the promise of a language-based approach for tracking and studying group identity processes in online groups.
Words of Wisdom Pennebaker, James W; Stone, Lori D
Journal of personality and social psychology,
08/2003, Volume:
85, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Two projects explored the links between language use and aging. In the first project, written or spoken text samples from disclosure studies from over 3,000 research participants from 45 different ...studies representing 21 laboratories in 3 countries were analyzed to determine how people change in their use of 14 text dimensions as a function of age. A separate project analyzed the collected works of 10 well-known novelists, playwrights, and poets who lived over the last 500 years. Both projects found that with increasing age, individuals use more positive and fewer negative affect words, use fewer self-references, use more future-tense and fewer past-tense verbs, and demonstrate a general pattern of increasing cognitive complexity. Implications for using language as a marker of personality among current and historical texts are discussed.
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39.
The Sounds of Social Life Mehl, Matthias R; Pennebaker, James W
Journal of personality and social psychology,
04/2003, Volume:
84, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The natural conversations and social environments of 52 undergraduates were tracked across two 2-day periods separated by 4 weeks using a computerized tape recorder (the Electronically Activated ...Recorder EAR). The EAR was programmed to record 30-s snippets of ambient sounds approximately every 12 min during participants' waking hours. Students' social environments and use of language in their natural conversations were mapped in terms of base rates and temporal stability. The degree of cross-context consistency and between-speaker synchrony in language use was assessed. Students' social worlds as well as their everyday language were highly consistent across time and context. The study sheds light on a methodological blind spot-the sampling of naturalistic social information from an unobtrusive observer's perspective.
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Recent interest in the implicit self-esteem construct has led to the creation and use of several new assessment tools whose psychometric properties have not been fully explored. In this article, the ...authors investigated the reliability and validity of seven implicit self-esteem measures. The different implicit measures did not correlate with each other, and they correlated only weakly with measures of explicit self-esteem. Only some of the implicit measures demonstrated good test-retest reliabilities, and overall, the implicit measures were limited in their ability to predict our criterion variables. Finally, there was some evidence that implicit self-esteem measures are sensitive to context. The implications of these findings for the future of implicit self-esteem research are discussed.
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