Say it Better

How Your Words Reveal Your Self-Image, World View and More

Who’s the VIP in the room? Find out by listening to the words people use. The higher one’s status in a situation, for example, the less one uses “I” in conversation.  We also use “I” less in the weeks after a major cultural upheaval like 9/11 for Americans. As we age we tend to use more positively emotional words and refer to ourselves less. The higher one’s social class the fewer emotional words one uses.

From our truthfulness to dominance or our mood we are enormously revealing to others – if they know how to recognize the content and style of our words.  That’s what University of Texas psychologist James W. Pennebaker is discovering.

Style words, according to Pennebaker, include conjunctions, articles, pronouns, prepositions and auxiliary verbs. Content words are nouns, regular verbs, and most adjectives and adverbs. The content words are what someone is saying and style words are how they are saying it.

Women use more negations, social words, pronouns, verbs, and references to psychological processes than men do. (Surprise.) Men tend to use more big words, numbers, articles and prepositions.

Pennebaker also discovered that: 

• One’s health is more likely to improve, not with the increased use of “emotion” words (sad, happy, joyful) but with more use of cognitive words (know, realize, understand).

• Public figures speaking in press conferences use more 1st person singular when they are depressed or prone to suicide.

 • When people tell the truth, they are more like to use first person singular pronouns.

 • When people’s testosterone levels increased rapidly, they dropped in their use of references to other people.

 • People who talked about traumatic experiences are physically healthier than those who kept such experiences secret.

Three free ways to learn how you see yourself and your world

 One

Learn about your personality from the style words you use by taking Pennebaker’s online questionnaire. He will analyze the results for you for free if you’ll allow him to use the results in his research. Discover whether you are high or low in the classic “big five” dimensions of personality: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Two

You can quickly glean insights about how you see the world depending on how you describe something as simple as a bottle, using what Pennebaker calls “the meaning extraction strategy.” 

Three

Or take just 15 minutes to describe yourself and learn even more.

Childhood Photos Are Predictors of Success in Marriage

Those who usually frowned in photos when they were children and teenagers are five times more likely to get divorced later in life than those who smiled in their photos.  The more intensely you smiled in childhood photos, the less likely that you’ll divorce later in life. (I’ll bet parents are going to examine their kids’ photos, reading this.)

That’s what psychology professor Matt Hertenstein concluded from his study.  Wonder what it means that he looks faintly uncomfortable as an adult in this photo.

Yet Matt’s team also concludes that this finding does not necessarily support the notion that happiness is contagious.

Also smiling for photos does not necessarily cause a good marriage, yet bright smiling and an enduring marriage are somehow connected.

Looking back at my childhood photos I often had a mild smile and that deer in headlights look.  Without seeing the photos Matt conjectured that might rate me a 5 out of 10.  In other words smack dab in the middle of the “smile intensity scale.” And I am divorced.