Pennebaker.

He is professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the executive director of Project 2021 aimed at rethinking undergraduate education at that university.

His cross disciplining research is related to linguistics, clinical and cognitive psychology, communications, medicine and computer science.

He and his students have explored natural language use, group dynamics and personality in educational and other real world settings.

He has demonstrated that physical health and work performance can be improved by simple writing or talking exercises.

Dr.

Pennebaker has received numerous awards and honors, has written or edited more than 250 scientific articles, as well as nine books, including more recently, expressive writing words That Hell and the Secret Life of Pronounce.

He also happens to be one of my favorite psychologists.

Welcome, Dr Pennebaker.

I'm very much looking forward to talking to you.

Well, it's nice to be here.

Thank you.

Great.

So as you may know, what?

Because I think we've talked about this a little bit before.

I developed some computer online computerized writing programs with my colleagues, one of which we call future, offering one's past offering ones present offering their a suite of writing program, said they were heavily influenced in their design.

By your research, my labs being interested in narrative for a long time and also in clinical work and and also in the application of psychology in the in the real world, setting in the practical setting.

And I I spent a lot of time developing tests to help employers screen for employees, and we got pretty good at that.

But well, I was doing that.

I was constantly bombarded with questions from managers of middle managers, usually of medium sized in large corporations, telling me that it was all well and good if we if they could hire better employees.

But they wanted to know what they could do with their poor performing employees because that was a continual, an intractable problem.

And I thought, Well, you don't have that much interaction with him and it's not that easy to solve people's problems, so there's probably not a lot you could do, but I kind of got sick of telling people that over and over and so I scoured the literature and it was at that point, probably about 15 years ago, 10 15 years ago that I came across your research on expressive writing.

So maybe you could start by telling us what you what you learned and how you got it.

Went about it.

Okay, Uh, a little bit of background.

I'm a social psychologist by training, so I don't have any clinical training.

I'm ah, most of my career has just been stumbling upon one idea after another is supposed to approaching anything with a clear set of where he was going.

I have been looking at mind body issues.

I've always been interested in how psychological factors influence physical health and mental health.

And I came across a fighting years ago that just bugged me and that Waas people have had a major traumatic experience, their lives that were much more likely to get sick in people who had not.

Now that that was an old finding.

But as I dug more deeply, what I discovered was people who had a trauma and kept it secret were far more likely to have health problems than people who had the same trauma but who talked with others about it.

And it made me wonder What if we brought people in the lab and had them actually write about it.

Some kind of trauma, ideally, one they hadn't talked to other people about.

Would that influence their health?

And that was really the underlying idea.

So the very first study was done in 1983 and we brought in about 50 people.

Some of them were asked to write about the most tremendous experience of their lives.

The other half arrest to write about superficial topics.

I'm simplifying study so and they wrote for four days, 15 minutes a day.

And they also gave us permission to track their student health center records.

These were college students, and this was at a private college where the student Health Center was right next to the dorms.

Well, what we discovered was that those people who were asked what about traumatic experiences and did not go into the student health center about half the right, as people in our control condition the ones who had written about superficial topics over the next 3 to 6 months.

And this was a really studying finding.

It was You know what?

I I kind of hope would occur, but I never I was so thrilled that it actually worked.

And then we did another study that was very similar.

And here again we had half the people write about traumas half right about superficial topics, and they just they wrote about trauma or superficial topics.

By a flip of the coin, we decided which of the two topics they write about.

And this time we drew blood before we assign them to condition again after the last day of writing and then six weeks later and the blood was asked by a group of people in Ohio State looking at immune function.

And again we found that writing about traumatic experiences associated with enhanced immune function and also reductions and doctor visits, and this now was takes us to about 1988 and by then other labs started to see what we were doing, and it the whole technique started to take off.

And then over the years, more and more labs, including my own, found generally positive effects.

Not always, but generally that writing about upsetting experiences had this Celia Torrey effect that influence both health, physical health and markers of mental health, and then later various lab found you to be related to all sorts of things associated with increased memory, cognitive functioning and so forth.

So so if I remember correctly as well, when you were doing the earliest studies, you were also influenced by Freud's idea, that of catharsis.

And that was the idea that if if people had a traumatic or unpleasant experience, if they were encouraged to express the emotions that were associated with that experience, that that would be curative, that was That was partly Freud's hypothesis.

But, well, it was a little bit.

It is important.

It is absolutely consistent with Freud Side initial idea.

And what was interesting is because most people listening to this podcast, we'll hear catharsis.

And they will think that catharsis means blowing off seeing right venting.

And that's not actually what Freud actually meant.

And it's interesting.

In Europe, catharsis has a completely different meaning than it does in North America.

So in North America we view, it is venting Freud and the Europeans.

You catharsis as connecting emotions and thoughts, and that is actually what I was doing.

I really I had assumed that Freud meant Banting and we had found actually that people who just blew off steam.

Who you just expressed emotions actually didn't show any health improvements regularly.

The linguistic analysis, right?

And things that was really fascinating about research.

So maybe you could tell us a bit about that, too.

Well, uh, I wasn't initially again, Uh, I have never I had never been any been interested in in psychotherapy and hair.

All of a sudden I was doing a study that was essentially glorified psychotherapy, which got me speaking to clinicians.

And then the question was why I was writing about an upsetting experience.

Bring about these changes and it that's not it.

It's a straightforward question, but there's not a straightforward answer in my lab, and others started looking at all sorts of possibilities and looking at markers of inhibition.

You know that people holding back were more prone to illness, and what this did was to loosen them up.

You didn't find good evidence for that.

Other people had other hypotheses, and at some point I started looking at what people were actually saying, and I got groups of people Clinton's duties who were in clinical psychology to rate the essays that people wrote on all these different dimensions and What I found was that relying on people to read these essays and come up with some kind of deep understanding or even predicting if a person would benefit or not, just didn't work, that it was too hard.

The stories were really traumatic.

They actually depressed a lot of the people who were nurses who were reading the essay.

So it occurred to me it would make much more sense to come up with some objective marker of reading.

These essays and a computer program would be what I needed.

Well, it turns out back then, this is now.

The early nineties, there was no such program, and fortunately I'd taken a little computer size in college.

And one of my graduate students, Martha Francis, had actually done.

Cem done her undergraduate degree in computer science.

And so I asked Martha, too, essentially helped me do a computer program that could go through it, analyzed the language of an essay.

Theo Idea behind it is really quite simple.

You have the computer go in and look at each word, and you would compare each word in the essay with some master list of words.

So we would let's say We're looking for anger words.

We want to computer to count up all the words associate with anger.

So we have this dictionary of anger words.

And to get that dictionary we had to make that ourselves yet to look in dictionaries, the sources we had to have students generate anger words.

And then we had all these rules of what account what makes for a good word versus not, but what you have that list you go through and you have a computer.

Look a each word.

Compare it with the master list and any time it finds it anger where it just adds it up.

And at the end it adds up all the anger words divided by the total number of words.

And it produces the percentage of total anger words and then in essay.

And we did this now for not just anger words or sad words, guilt, words, negative emotion, words in general.

But we did positive emotion, words and then cognitive words, words that suggested causing the fact like cause because effect Russian out where such as that And then, as long as we were doing it, we added more and more dimensions.

We could, you know, we had pronounced propositions and articles, et cetera, et cetera, ended up with about now if there's probably 80 different dimensions.

But when we went back and started looking at essays, we found that certain dimensions of writing really predicted health improvements.

Now we found that use of positive emotions was associated with health improvement, so she could write a essay about the worst thing in your life and still use positive emotions.

It's a marker that you're going to show health improvements.

The effects are pretty small.

Negative emotion words using a moderate number of negative emotions is weakly related, t doing better as well.

But what turned out to be far stronger was use of cognitive words, words like because cause effect where it's like, understand, realized.

No, these air worst.

We now know our markers of people working through a problem.

So let me ask you a question about that, because I thought a lot about that.

I thought that was really interesting idea.

So this question has to do with this function of memory.

So it's pretty obvious that we don't and can't store.

What's the equivalent of a videotape of the entire domain of sensory experience when we're interacting with people, and it is obvious as well that that isn't how memory works and that memory is modifiable across time.

And so here's a hypothesis for you and tell me what you think about this.

It seems to me that the purpose of memory is so that you can remember the good things that happened to you in the past and how they occurred and duplicate them in the future.

And remember the bad things that happened and figure out why and change your course of life and your pathway in the future so that they occur less frequently.

And so the cause and effect analysis would be something like the adjustment of our of a pathway mouth.

And it sort of reminds me of the work that was done with rap memory because they hit the campus seems to store something like cognitive maps and maps.

Almost by definition, are are representations of ways to get from one place to another, and so you could think, maybe that you go from one place to another and you fall into a hole, and that's very traumatic.

And so you you remember the pathway and how you got there and analyze it and reconstruct a different potential future causal pathway so that you don't have to fall in the same hole twice.

You know, I don't know what you think about that, but I think that actually I think that works is true both the way you describe it, but also on a much broader metaphorical level.

So, for example, a person who falls into an emotional hold that their life is going well and then their girlfriend dumps them.

And they, uh, go on, get drunk in a bar, wreck their car.

That experience is incredibly incredibly complex.

And it, unlike the rat, what the human mind has to figure out what in the world went on with my girlfriend?

Why did she leave me?

What did I do?

Why did I go get drunk?

Have I've been drinking too much and right if to process that requires tremendous cognitive capacity.

And what happens is if it's something we're humiliated about, we're really reticent to talk to other people about it and we sew it.

And language is a really efficient way to process complex issues.

Yes, that's right.

Well, so what I found in my clinical practice very frequently is that I think with people who are traumatized, they often encounter.

This is something else I wanted to ask you about.

They often have an encounter with malevolence as well as a za call as an encounter with just catastrophe.

So it's not only that something bad happens to them.

It's often something bad that's being consciously directed at the by another person, and they have a really hard time mapping out, especially if they're somewhat 90 people.

But then the other people who are detrimentally affected by such things and can't recover are those who have no one to listen to them.

Because people, it seems to me that most people think by talking, and unless you have someone to talk to, you actually don't get to think through it and draw the appropriate let's call them cause of lessons.

So and then you also made this comment about you know, let's say the classic example I like to use is that, you know, maybe you're a pre med student and you write the medical, the G, what is it?

What's the one for medical interest and that Yeah, yeah, Yeah, So you know, you construe yourself is a pretty solid student, and that's a core element of you, like it's a predicated of the multiple maps of your life that you use, And then you write the M cat and you end up with 20th percentile scores.

And so then what happens is that not only is your map of the future now render null and void, but so is your map of you as a predicate for present actions.

And also everything about yourself that you thought held true in the past has to be re examined.

And so it's something like the degree of trauma is proportionate to the amount of the area, that of map that's disturbed by the by the by the unfortunate, unexpected and sometimes a malevolent event.

And and so then the other thing I was thinking about with regards to this and I think this is the more Germaine to the immunological element is so it's obviously very, very difficult for the mind to compute how dangerous the environment.