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  • So today I'm talking to Dr James W.

  • 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.

  • It's because the environment, in some sense, is infinitely dangerous and and you never know when something small happens to you.

  • If it's the harbinger of something that's terrible.

  • So because of taking your side could be the cancer that kills you.

  • So you might ask yourself, given the complexity of of framing in an unexpected event, how do you will ever manage it so part of its temperamental.

  • So if you're hiring neuroticism, things hit you harder, and part of it is based on your observed confidence.

  • But the other part, I think, is something like It's something like the brain computes the proportion of times that you failed in the past, compared to the perform to the times that you've succeeded and calculates are like a mean danger in debts.

  • And then it it raises up your average cortisol levels in correspondence to how dangerous the general environment is being, because that puts you on alert more.

  • And the problem with the advantage to being on alert is that, well, if anything else, negative happens.

  • You're more ready to act.

  • But the negative consequences is that cortisol is toxic and in reason, you know, in high doses across time, and it also suppresses immunological function, and it also tends to suppress pre frontal functioning as well, because pretty the prefrontal cortex is more involved in law, medium to long term planning and lesson short term, like emergency preparation activities.

  • So I'd also like to know, you know, that that those ideas ring ring a bell that they see so and so they do that there's an interesting.

  • So there's another dimension that ties into this and that is sleep.

  • So we know that Sleeps is intimately related to cortisol was related to depression.

  • It's related to immune function is related to.

  • You know, all of these systems are inter correlated and the person who is dealing with an upheaval that they're trying to understand, but they don't have somebody to talk to, and I'm not sleeping as well, and part of it is they're trying to process all this additional information, and this ties into that the idea of working memory that they have less working memory.

  • You're not sleeping as well.

  • Court is all is is higher there, and they are also worse friends, so that so when you talk to them, they're distracted, they're not paying attention.

  • And so all of these things are working together to undermine the person.

  • Now the court is all hypothesis is a is a wonderful hypothesis.

  • The killer problem is that the studies that have been done with cortisol and it's linked to writing and trauma have been.

  • You have to stand back and look at the overall studies and kind of squint, and there's a weak evidence to support it.

  • But it's not as cleaning as I wish it were that of course, this has been the problem with with the writing research, But it's also the problem of all clinical research that there is.

  • You know, once you start getting real data and this is not just self reports of P of a client saying, Oh, yeah, that was really great.

  • When you start to get objective hard data, everything is kind of off the table that the effects sizes are very, very modest.

  • By the way.

  • That's true of medical outcomes as well for medical disease.

  • So okay, so well, you're the downward spiral that you sort of described there, too.

  • But also account for could also account for the negative health consequences post trauma.

  • I mean, so you can imagine exactly things first of all, is that the traumatized person is gonna be more reactive to additional trauma.

  • But also that as they as they as the effects of their failure cascade saying across their friendship interfere with their, uh, educational function, interfere with their sleep.

  • The quality of their life overall is going to decline.

  • And that should also produce multiple small stressors that are going to compromise them, including saying that the decreased sleep and maybe also alterations and appetite and those might accumulate across time and produced the negative health consequences as well.

  • Yeah, And don't forget that.

  • Will smoke more, drink more, take more drugs.

  • Stop exercising.

  • Yes, kids out there.

  • When you have a trauma, take care of yourself.

  • Right?

  • Right, right.

  • Yes.

  • Yes.

  • Well, yeah, well, I mean, the first thing I do with my clinical clients, generally speaking, is make sure that they're getting enough sleep.

  • Yeah, try to reregulate.

  • They're sleeping.

  • And also to make sure they eat breakfast at least because that without those two things, it's very difficult for someone to get themselves back on the straight and narrow.

  • So so now when we designed the self altering program, I think I had read, I think it was research by Laura King.

  • But I don't remember somebody had taken your writing exercises and applied them to the future.

  • Had people write about the future instead of the past and found similar effects?

  • Was that lower King?

  • That's Lauren.

  • What was interesting was that study, uh, you would think having people right, what she thought, what she'd have people write about the past versus right about the future versus both.

  • And her idea was that having them right about both would be best cause in its way.

  • Therapy sometimes works in that way, so let's work through their issues.

  • And what are the implications for the future?

  • She find that writing about both actually wasn't very effective, that having them right about the future was beneficial or just the past was beneficial.

  • And since then there's been a lot of other studies looking at having people write about just positive effects and or just negative.

  • And what is generally found is that writing about positive effects is also beneficial for health.

  • But, well, what kind of indicates is the thinking has been official for help, you know, I think that that's true, and it's also, you know, the best studies as I stand back and look at the kind of the broad, uh, panorama of risk of researches giving people instructions to write really loosely in the sense of Yep.

  • Here you write about the most traumatic experience of your life.

  • But, you know, a lot of people haven't had traumas.

  • Or maybe you've come to terms with traumas, but right about those topics that are weighing upon you the most.

  • Right now they may be positive.

  • They may be negative.

  • They may be most.

  • You are a little bit of both.

  • And essentially, that's what I encourage people to do is to If you're having trouble sleeping, set aside 15 minutes and just explore your thoughts and feelings about issues that are weighing on you.

  • Maybe something that you don't want to talk about or something you really want to dress?

  • Yeah.

  • Yeah, well, when way set up the future run you by the latest research on the future offering program because you won't know about all of it.

  • But so basically what we've done with the Future on three program, which is the one with which now we've administered to thousands of university students in different locales with very, very stable results, and the results are quite remarkable I think, um so the way the thing is structure is we first get people to consider six important dimensions of their life.

  • So we're kind of destroying the individual is something that's distributed across dimensions, practical dimensions.

  • So those are intimate relationship friendships, family career education, Um, time spent outside of work and use of drugs and alcohol.

  • Because that's a rabbit hole, people can really go down.

  • And having a at least an idea of how you should handle intoxicating substances is better than just going into it blindly.

  • So the first thing we get people to write about and loosely following following that idea it's like a free association idea.

  • It's like when analysis right, it's like, But it also, I think, freeze people up to make mistakes because they get uptight.

  • If they have to do it right, you have to say, Look, you don't have to do it right.

  • You could do it badly.

  • It's better than not doing it at all, so we have the right to vote to envision what they would like it if they could have what they wanted on each of those domains.

  • It's like, Okay, there's 3 to 5 years down the road.

  • Imagine you're taking care of yourself and as if you were someone you cared about and that things were said a possibly for you.

  • Hypothetically, what would that look like?

  • And what I found in my clinical practice very frequently is that people are afraid of specifying their future because they're afraid of hope.

  • But also there's an avoidance element, which is that once you specify your criteria for success, you've also specified your criteria for failure.

  • If you keep things vague and ill defined, then you can stumble along without ever really noticing that you're lost.

  • And it's a really bad strategy in the medium to long term.

  • But but I think it's It's effective as a means of, um, while itself.

  • It's effective self deception in the short term.

  • Anyways, they do that first, and then we get them to write for 15 minutes, with no concern for spelling or grammar, which I think we took directly from your research and just just sketch out what life could be like 33 years down the road.

  • If they had, what would be good for them?

  • All right, so now that that also gives them something to aim for.

  • And so one of one of the things that we we've we've bean thinking through with regards to having something to aim for is the fact that the the systems that utilise dopamine, the incentive reward systems which which basically produced most of the positive emotion of the kind that people really like on Lee respond in relationship to a specified goal.

  • So you feel on incentive reward kick when you're moving towards a value target, so there's no value target.

  • There's no positive emotion in life except in consequence of direct pleasures, say, But there's no ongoing excitement or enthusiasm about tackling hard problems, for example, because there's no evidence that those air related to a value destination.

  • And it's the entire dopamine ergic system that responds to.

  • And that's of course, the system that cocaine and drugs like that.

  • If they're and so, then we do something else, which we've introduced more recently, which is we say Okay, now look, you specified the positive pole and that gives you something to run towards.

  • Now we want you to think through the ways that the faults that you have and the and the resentment and anger that you hold for whatever it is that you're angry about and resentful about an unhappy boat and to consider your bad habits and imagine where those to drag you 3 to 5 years from now if you let them take the upper hand.

  • And so people write about that for 15 minutes and we think, well, that gives them a negative pole to run away from, like a hell to run away from in heaven to run towards.

  • There's good evidence from the animal literature that animals that are running away and running towards at the same time our run faster.

  • They're more motivated.

  • In the second half, they lay out well articulated long term implementable plan and we tried to get them to deeply articulated say, Well, you know, Drake it into eight goals.

  • Rank, order the goals.

  • If you attained gold number one, why would that be good for you?

  • Why would it be good for your family?

  • Why would it be good for broader society?

  • What would you do with obstacles, Rose?

  • Okay, so that's the pattern.

  • And now at the university of at Rotterdam?

  • Yeah, they have the business school there, so it's Rotterdam School of Management.

  • I've been working with Michaela shippers there and her colleagues.

  • We've run about 7000 people through that now, and the research indicates there's a bunch of interesting things.

  • Um, overall, it's raised great point average.

  • About 20% drop the dropout rate about 25% which is absolutely phenomenal, far larger effects that we would have imagined.

  • But the effects are quite interesting because, you know, moat, with most interventions you rate.

  • If there's a distribution of performance, you you intervene and you raise the higher performing people even higher.

  • You know, absent a ceiling, right, right.

  • This'll has the opposite effect.

  • It raises the lower end up at Rotterdam, the students that were most positively effective.

  • We're the ones who were performing the worst on their way divided them up by gender and ethnicity.

  • So male, female, obviously.

  • But then we divided them into ethnic Hollander's so mostly Caucasian natives and then non Western ethnic minorities.

  • So the males were underperforming the females.

  • Yeah, it was female Dutch natives, male, Dutch natives, female, non Western ethnic minorities, male known west and ethnic minorities.

  • There's a big gap between the Dutch females and the non western ethnic minority men within two years of completing the program, the non ethnic Western minority man past the Dutch women, even the very cool, but also increased a little bit.

  • Yes.

  • Oh, and then we replicated that more recently in Canada at a little college called Moja College.

  • And we found there that men were underperforming women again.

  • And then we divided them into how well they were doing in high school before they came into college.

  • And the worst performing males were the ones who were doing poorly in university before they hit college are sorry.

  • The males who were in high school and who had the worst grades were those who improved most with the use of the future offering program.

  • And they all they did the whole thing in an hour, badly in one session.

  • That's very that's very impressive.

  • Could you send me a copy of that?

  • I would love to see that, because that can you copy the hard paper yet?

  • Because it hasn't been released, but I can send you.

  • Yeah, that's because he's the leader of the issues.

  • Of course I'm dealing with right now on here at the University of Texas trying to find out.

  • You know, most of the interventions that we are looking at is essentially a mean at lower social class kids who are coming to college for the first time.

  • Who faced so many obstacles that the upper middle class Jews aren't even aware exist.

  • Well, weren't see, we're trying to think through why this works, you know, and so part of it is, I think, and I thought this through a lot.

  • Part of it is I think, that the schools before college never require, really require kids to make a decision, and they don't teach them how to make decisions.

  • They never teach them that their life is theirs to master, let's say, and that they have to make a plan, but that the plan has to serve them.

  • We also have a suspicion that maybe men won't work unless they have their own plan.

  • Maybe that's associated with trade agreeableness, although we're still investigating that.

  • But there is no doubt that these, at least as far as our research has shown that these interventions, the future planning interventions, seem to have a more solitary effect on men.

  • But the men are under performing you know.

  • So for some reason, the women don't have the same problem.

  • But it's something like males won't work unless they have their own reasons to which which wouldn't surprise me, given that males are more disagreeable than females.

  • So it's certainly possible.

  • But you know, the the effects on drop out at more callers were walloping about 50% decrease in the first semester.

  • And, of course, that's when kids always drop out.

  • So there's something about having a plan.

  • So we're thinking to that what's happening is, and this kind of goes back to your comments about both positive and negative emotions, it seems to be something like uncertainty reduction.

  • And so so that reduces the effect of doubt, Let's say and also tagging, you know, having the person designed a future.

  • They also want tags, success with positive emotion, and that carries them forward potentially through obstacles.

  • So be very interesting to analyze the essays that these people wrote you Xena using our computer program.

  • Yeah, well, you know, I think we may have done that if I remember correctly.

  • We may have done that with the with the Rotterdam study, but I have to look because we've used your L.

  • R W C a couple of times t to look for the same sort of phenomena.

  • We've also done that toe look at whether or not we could extract Big Five traits from from writing samples, and that's also possible.

  • So unless unless, uh, sanguine about the Big Five approach because language and self reports are really, really different animals.

  • Yeah, well, well, I'd like to talk to you now if you would about about you.

  • Now you you did the computer analysis of words and that got you interested in different categories of words.

  • Correct that scrapbook on pronounce.

  • That's right.

  • Part of the reason I want to talk to you about pronouns, apart from the fact that I'm interested in is I've been embroiled in a political controversy in Canada for the last five months.

  • They There's been legislation here formulated at the federal level.

  • It's already in place, provincial level, mandating the use of what have been called preferred pronouns, and I don't know if that's come to the University of Texas at Austin or not yet.

  • But the idea is that people of non specific gender, let's say, have the right to choose the pronouns by which other people will address them, and that's actually being mandated.

  • And Canadian law, which is something I've been objecting to vociferously because I don't believe the government should mandate language content.

  • I think it's a mask there, but anyway, so I have a specific interest in programs, and I know also that pronouns air in a closed linguistic category so that they don't change that frequently.

  • But you wrote a whole book describing why pronouns were so significant from a psychological perspective, right?

  • And it's more it's not just pronounce.

  • It's a whole class of words called function words.

  • And if you look at any text or you listen very carefully, most of what we convey are what we call content words.

  • These air now NHS and regular burbs and, uh, agit is most advert and there during the guts of what we're talking about.

  • But we have all these little words articles a and in the propositions two of four pronouns.

  • He she, they it etcetera, and in English there's only about 180 common pronouns.

  • Now the average person has vocabulary of 100,000 words, but only you know less than 1/2 of 1% of stuff of those words are these function words.

  • Yet they account for 60% of all the words we use.

  • They day control how we talk and what they specifying is how we connect with one another they and and how we connect with our topic and how we think about ourselves and our group.

  • And by analyzing these function words, you got a really good sense of who a person is and that that's the underlying theory of the work I've been doing for the last several years using his computer program, which is linguistic inquiry workout L I W C.

  • Which I pronounced Luke in the Loop program, is really just a dumb program that mostly is looking at the's function words.

  • So So tell us some things that you found it.

  • Okay, so specific words.

  • So So, um, let's start off with with the most commonly used spoken word, which is the word I I tells us so much about people, and if you go into your e mail, you're gonna see that use I sometimes sometimes in an email you won't.

  • So, for example, people who are depressed used the word I more than when they're not depressed.

  • People who are suicidal use it even Maur.

  • So one of our first studies was looking at poets who either committed suicide or didn't and we analyze their poetry.

  • The suicidal poet did not use more negative emotion words.

  • They didn't make more references to death.

  • They used the word I more.

  • And why?

  • Because pronouns including I tell us where we're paying attention.

  • If used the word I yourself focused and then you know, as a clinician that one of the theories off depression is that it's a disease of self focused that people are so ruminated and looking inward.

  • So much so that so that seems related to the to the psychometric.

  • Finding that self consciousness is, ah, a facet of neuroticism.

  • Uh, so let let me ask you one other question alone with them.

  • But so because self consciousness seems to load with negative emotions, but also one of the things that I often recommend to my clinical clients, who are socially anxious because I've watched how they interact and because they get self focused, they don't look at other people.

  • They don't look at their face.

  • For example, and that's precisely thinking about how other people are looking at them, and they're busily thinking about what you say next.

  • And so what happens is they stopped looking at the face of the people that they're they're talking to or listening to them, And so then they're extraordinarily awkward.

  • And so what I've done is instead of telling people to stop thinking about themselves, I've said when you enter a conversation, really, really focus on the other people push your attention outward because that seems to activate their unconscious and not traumatized.

  • Professional.

  • Let's say so.

  • It's exactly right skills, and then they flow with the conversation.

  • That's exactly right.

  • And And to build on this, the idea of people who are leaders and status.

  • If you look at the two people you can, you can tell with remarkable accuracy.

  • Who's the higher status by the person who uses fewer eyes.

  • The high status person doesn't use the word I much The lower status person doesn't because the high status person is looking out at the world and the lower status person is your pointed out is looking inward, and you could take this to the bank.

  • Go look at your e mails and you'll see when you're writing someone of higher status, you tend to use I'm or when you're writing to someone of lower status, you use I less So it's so okay, so let me Okay, let me tell you another observation that did I have, do you tell me what you think about this.

  • I'm gonna tell you with the Tell you Botha an observation from animation first.

  • So I've done some very in depth analysis of various Disney movies, including The Lion King and The Lion King.

  • Involves a child and then in the adolescent lion who matures.

  • And so and the animators also represented his father.

  • Now his father has a very interesting face because it looks like this, like it's, it's it's focused forward and kind of staring, almost take of almost predatory because of predatory gaze is locked on someone else, but and then the the adolescent lion, whose kind of naive and an imbecilic in some sense is like this all the time.

  • And so it seems to me that there's a relationship between in maturity and and south focus and maturity and outward focus.

  • And in The Lion King when the adolescent line undergoes this initiation rite, his face changes into one up like this into one of determination.

  • And the other thing that seems related to this is that you know, people are speaking in front of a group.

  • They often get self conscious and they feel all the eyes on, and that makes them self conscious.

  • And one of the things that I've recommended to people who want to speak to groups is never to speak to the group just to look at one individual and then another individual and then another individual.

  • Because that, well, that seems to foster communication.

  • But it also blows out the probability of becoming self conscious.

  • That's exactly that's exactly right.

  • In fact, I have recommended to teacher trainers.

  • So here's what you do at my university for teacher trading.

  • You give a a practice lecture and you have the camera is in the audience looking at you.

  • That's the wrong way to do it.

  • The way you should train teachers is put a camera behind the teacher at the audience and point out afterwards.

  • Look, they're not.

  • That guy's not paying attention to you.

  • That person is, and in other words not making yourself focused, making you that if your training to teacher training to public speaker doing exactly what you're saying, you should give him the view of the what the audience looks like and not what you look right.

  • That's the exact wrong training.

  • Absolutely, you know.

  • Okay, so tell me what you think about this.

  • When I'm lecturing, I pay attention to the people who are paying attention now, being what I mean most of the time, most people in my lectures are paying attention, at least a reasonable proportion of them, but the ones that aren't well, I don't know why they're not, but there's lots of reasons they might have had a bad night.

  • It might be overtired.

  • They may have taken the course by mistake.

  • I mean, God only knows, But if I'm paying attention to the students that are paying attention, then I can read off their faces how the audience is thinking, especially if I glance around.

  • But it's that intense communication from individual to individual that seems to make a lecturer or an interview, our conversation really compelling.

  • That's exactly right.

  • But I I think that the secret to one of the secrets to be in a good teacher and a good speaker is really being ableto watch.

  • And then also to judge when all of a sudden you're starting to lose.

  • So you know, you're you're also doing little experiments the whole time.

  • Uh, you know, one of the things that people who are relatively new is they start to lose people, and then they start speaking more quickly.

  • Which, of course, is precisely the wrong thing to do.

  • And they start paying less attention.

  • Yes, they get self conscious and want to hide from the audience.

  • And then they get into a loop.

  • Yeah, and any towns just go.

  • You know, the worst speakers I'd ever seen stand at the front of the off the audience with their head down and mumble at their feet.

  • It's just painful.

  • I mean, okay, Okay.

  • So that's very, very interesting.

  • So Okay.

  • So you talked about I You talked about dominance.

  • What?

  • What else have you learned about specific words?

  • Well, a couple more things about I mixed with some others.

  • One is his honesty.

  • So the ability to detect deception versus honesty and function of how people talk and what we find is that we've done many studies where we induce people to lie and tell the truth, and then we look at the transcripts of the two.

  • But when we find it, when people tell the truth, they tend to use I'm or they owning what they're saying and the person who's lying, it's psychologically distancing, distancing themselves from what they're saying.

  • And then there's another feature is when you're telling the truth, you tend to use more words that are We used to call them exclusive words or differentiation words where you use words like accept, but without exclude words for you making a distinction between West in a category and not in a category.

  • That thes exclusive kind of words are You're being more honest cause you're saying what you did, but also what you didn't do.

  • And that's a really complex cognitive task.

  • Whereas if you're lying and you didn't do any of it to say what you didn't not do, it's just beyond the capabilities of most people.

  • So both I word usage and these exclusive words together do a pretty good job, and another one is also focusing on detail.

  • So person you do there with political speeches.

  • Oh, yeah, and there've been some.

  • There's been some nice research on that as well.

  • Jeff Hancock, for example, is not.

  • Stanford has played with this idea quite a bit when he was looking at all of them rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction during the Bush administration that there that what he found was administrators were be using deceptive language.

  • Prior thio, the U.

  • S.

  • Before prior to our going to war.

  • So so So that opens it up up the hole.

  • Completely appalling.

  • An interesting scenario.

  • It's like me.

  • Increasingly, people are using computer programs to analyze personality and that sort of thing by by by analyzing people's behavior on the Web.

  • That's exactly right.

  • And we've been done.

  • Been doing this a lot with with political figures and, in fact, one of my graduate students like Kayla Jordan, we've been we have a website.

  • It's called word Watchers.

  • It's word watchers dot wordpress dot com and like going there, you can see our analysis of Trump and actually this whole election from from from my perspective, as a scientist, this has been a phenomenal electoral season as a human being, not so much, but he's so I'm gonna I'm gonna get you would wear when we're done here.

  • All he mail you and you could give me some links, Okay, That I can put in a description here where people can go look this sort of thing up.

  • So that's interesting.

  • So could you.

  • Can you actually rank order politicians in terms of the probability that they're telling the truth?

  • Um, that way.

  • Have a Yes, I could, but I'm not sure I trust it very much because one of the interesting issues about deception is you've got some people who are deceptive who are deceptive, but they honestly believe they're telling the truth.

  • And I I I think Trump actually falls into that category.

  • I think he actually believes what he says, And he might say just the opposite.

  • 10 minutes later, and he'll believe that as well.

  • Yeah, So do you suppose Okay, so that's interesting, because I've seen in in poorly written undergraduate essays you commonly see, I think about it as fracturing at different levels of the linguistic hierarchy.

  • So, you know, if you listen to a schizophrenic speak, they're actually fractured at the level of the phrase, and then If you listen to a manic speak, they're more like fractured out the level of the sentence or the paragraph.

  • They say a whole paragraph In the next paragraph, they'll say something completely different.

  • That contradicts the first paragraph, but there's no awareness of the contradiction and poorly written undergraduate essay.

  • Still be a claim made on Page one, and then it claimed a joint made on Page two that are completely antithetical.

  • And you know, it isn't self evident that you become conscious of paradoxes in your thinking unless you act out both propositions simultaneously and it produces a conflict because you could hold paradox.

  • That's right without ever knowing it.

  • And so maybe, maybe what happens with someone who who does that sort of contradictory speeches that temperamentally they're very confident so they might be assertive for That's right something and maybe also low or high and stress told So they're not anxious people.

  • They're assertive, and they don't really care so much what other people think.

  • So they come across continually, is confident, and so that would be more like temperamental confidence, which is which is a form.

  • It's a funny thing because it's not exactly the same as telling the truth.

  • But it is something more like believing what you say or believing in what you say.

  • That's right.

  • And if what?

  • I think that the text analytic approach is better at, it's when a person knows damn well they're telling telling a lie, and and that's when our tails do better.

  • There's another phenomenon is called a performative.

  • That's one of my favorites that you can you hear and that is performative are used in linguistics, and they're usually a phrase, And they might be something like, let me assure you, or as I said before, or believe me when I say.

  • And if you haven't performative, it makes the entire sentence, uh, on you're not able to detect If it's true or not, you can't establish the truth value.

  • Let me assure you that this is a glass of water now.

  • Is that true or not?

  • Well, it's yes, actually, it is because I want, you know, I want to assure you use a glass of water.

  • It's true because I want to assure you that that it is even though not all right, and what happens is consciously we don't know.

  • We do this, but is almost so Our brain.

  • It's kind of trying to protect us.

  • And we throw these up and there's I have another Web page that has a number of performative that you see in President after President, where the president says something that the beginning sets it up so performative and in the second half, sure enough, it is a line.

  • Yeah, well, so do you suppose that Okay, that's interesting.

  • So do you.

  • Do you suppose that so is the performance of Ah, marker for for deceit is is I think it is.

  • Yes, I think it is.

  • And it said in fact, in fact trumps great.

  • His best one is, believe me.

  • So, um, um, I know more about the army than the generals.

  • Believe me, right?

  • Right.

  • Convince himself He is.

  • And it's it's a form of performative, which is he's really saying, Please believe me that I know Maur that that up tonight, right?

  • He doesn't see it that way, but that's what it essentially is.

  • So it kind of makes you wonder if he thinks that if people believe them, that makes it true.

  • Exactly.

  • It's a funny thing because there is some truth to the idea that true things are what other people believe.

  • You know, Obviously you don't want to go too far down that.

  • But there is something, I mean, because, for example, a contract holds no truth unless there's consensus around it.

  • So whenever the reality is dependent on everyone agreeing to do the same thing, then consensus is actually a very good marker for truth.

  • You know, because there's lots of situations where you say, Well, if we agree on all this, then it's gonna be true.

  • That's what a contract is.

  • So?

  • So it's It's almost a Ziff.

  • Using words like that is an attempt to establish a contract where no contract can genuinely be established.

  • I mean, we can't have a contract about whether or not Iran has weapons of mass destruction, but we could certainly have a contract about whether or not we'll go to war over Go.

  • No.

  • Well, there's a There's a hole we could go for hours on this, actually, so another one that I've been quite interested in is using these groups of words and looking at how two people connect and in terms of these function words, so what we could do is we could actually calculate the percentage agreement we have in our use of pronouns.

  • Propositions are

So today I'm talking to Dr James W.

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對話。德州大學奧斯汀分校JW Pennebaker教授 (Dialogue: Great U Texas Austin Psych Prof JW Pennebaker)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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