Words and Social Processes
Tentative Syllabus, Spring 2013
James W. Pennebaker
pennebaker@mail.utexas.edu
4.212 Seay
Office hours: Tuesday 10-11:30 or by appointment
Phone: 232-2781
January 14
January 28
February 4
February 11
February 18
February 25
Background and LIWC overview
The psychometrics of words
Personality and individual
differences, emotion
Author identification
Thinking patterns
Deception
March 4
March 18
March 25
April 1
*Pennebaker (2007a)
*Michel; *Pennebaker (2007b)
Chung (2007); *Pennebaker (1999);
Tausczik
*Argamon; *Foster
*Barner; Carnaghi; Gentner
Burgoon; *Hancock (2008); *Toma
(2012)
Ireland (2010); *Ireland (2011)
Fiedler; Gonzales (2008); *Simmons
Back; Cohn; Elson; *Nisbett
*Boroditsky; *Wierzbicka
Language style matching
Small group dynamics
Communities and cultures
Cross-language and crossculture
April 8
Meaning extraction (Guest
*Chung (2008); Wolf
speaker: Cindy Chung)
April 15
Applications: Legal, national
*Smith
security
April 22
Applications: Health, education, *Ginsburg
business
April 29
Presentations
*Required reading. Those without asterisks are strongly encouraged.
To download the readings, go to:
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/pennebaker/wordsclass/readings/
Course philosophy
The purpose of the course is to introduce students to the links between natural language
and social psychological processes. Unlike most graduate classes, this one is devoted to
discovering new relationships rather than simply learning traditional literatures.
There is only one formal paper: A grant proposal due on May 3. In addition, students will
be expected to master basic text analysis including the use of LIWC and possibly other
language analysis software programs. Each week, students will be expected to make a brief
5-10 minute presentation either on a particular discovery that they have made using a data
set that they have collected or a pre-existing one. Occasionally, students will be asked to
read and summarize an article required for class.
Because this is a collaborative class, attendance is essential. Grades will be based on the
grant proposal (50%), participation (25%), and class presentations (25%).
Warning: This class will analyze whatever language might be available, including in-class
discussions, shared in-class chats, or even shared emails as long as participating students
are aware that the emails will be made public.
Writing a grant proposal
Central to modern academia is the ability to secure funding for your research. There are a
large number of funding agencies all of which require you to submit a grant proposal. For
this course, your goal will be to write a grant proposal that should be 10-20 double-spaced
pages, not counting references. The topic can be anything you want but must be built
around the use of language as a primary outcome or process variable. You will need to set
the proposal up in a way that you think an agency would be motivated to fund you. In other
words, you must make a compelling argument on why the culture needs to pay for the idea
you are selling.
We will discuss this in greater detail in class.
Readings
Argamon, S., Koppel, M., Pennebaker, J.W., & Schler, J. (2009). Automatically profiling the
author of an anonymous text. Communications of the Association for Computing
Machinery (CACM), 52, 119-123.
Back, M.D., Kufner, A.C.P., & Egloff, B. (2010). The emotional timeline of September 11,
2001. Psychological Science, DOI 10.1177/0956797610382124
Barner, D., Li, P., & Snedeker, J. (2010). Words as windows to thought: The case of object
representation. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 195-200.
Boroditsky, L. (2010). Lost in translation: New cognitive research suggests that language
profoundly influences the way people see the world; a difference sense of blame in
Japanese and Spanish. Wall Street Journal, Saturday, July 24, 2010.
Burgoon, J.K., & Quinn, T. (2006). The dynamic nature of deceptive verbal communication.
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 25, 76-96.
Carnaghi, C., Maass, A., Gresta, S., Cadinu, M., & Arcuri, L. (2008). Nomina Sunt Omina: On
the inductive potential of nouns and adjectives in person perception. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 839-859.
Chung, C. K., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2008). Revealing dimensions of thinking in open-ended selfdescriptions: An automated meaning extraction method for natural language. Journal of
Research in Personality, 42, 96-132.
Chung, C.K., & Pennebaker, J.W. (2007). The psychological functions of function words. In K.
Fiedler (Ed.), Social communication (pp. 343-359). New York: Psychology Press.
Cohn, M.A., Mehl, M.R., & Pennebaker, J.W. (2004). Linguistic Markers of Psychological
Change Surrounding September 11, 2001. Psychological Science, 15, 687-693.
Elson, S. B., Yeung, D., Roshan, P., Bohandy, S. R., & Nader, A. (2012). Using social media to
gauge Iranian public opinion and mood after the 2009 election. Santa Monica, Calif:
RAND Corporation, TR-1161-RC, 2012. As of February 29, 2012:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR1161
Fiedler, K., Bluemke, M., Friese, M., & Hofmann, W. (2003). On the different uses of
linguistic abstractness: From LIB to LEB and beyond. European Journal of Social
Psychology, 33, 441-453.
Foster, D. (1998). Article by Caleb Crain in Lingua Franca:
http://web.archive.org/web/20011101111232/www.linguafranca.com/9807/crai
n.html
Gentner, D. (1981). Some interesting differences between verbs and nouns. Cognition and
Brain Theory, 4, 161Ginsberg, J., Mohebbi, M.H., Patel, R.S., Brammer, L., Smolinski, M.S., & Brilliant, L. (2009).
Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data. Nature, 457,
doi:10.1038/nature07634
Gonzales, A.L., Hancock, J.T., & Pennebaker, J.W. (2010). Language style matching as a
predictor of social dynamics in small groups. Communication Research, 31, 3-19.
Graesser, A. C., Jeon, M., Yang, Y., & Cai, Z. (2007). Discourse cohesion in text and tutorial
dialogue. Information Design Journal, 15, 199–213.
Hancock, J.T., Curry, L., Goorha, S., & Woodworth, M.T. (2008). On lying and being lied to: A
linguistic analysis of deception. Discourse Processes, 45, 1-23.
Ireland, M. E., Slatcher, R. B., Eastwick, P. W., Scissors, L. E., Finkel, E. J., & Pennebaker, J.
W. (2011). Language style matching predicts relationship formation and stability.
Psychological Science.
Ireland, M.E., & Pennebaker, J.W. (2010). Language style matching in writing: Synchrony in
essays, correspondence, and poetry. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99,
549-571.
Michel, J-B., Shen, Y.K., Aiden, A.P., Veres, A., Gray, M.K., The Google Books Team, Pickett,
J.P., Hoiberg, D., Clancy, D., Norvig, P., Orwant, J., Pinker, S., Nowak, M.A., & Aiden, E.L.
(2010). Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science,
16 December 2010, DOI 10.1126/science.1199644.
Nisbett, R.E., & Masuda, T. (2003). Culture and point of view. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, 100, 11163-11170.
Pennebaker, J.W., Booth, R.E., & Francis, M.E. (2007a). Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count:
LIWC2007 – Operator’s manual. Austin, TX: LIWC.net.
Pennebaker, J.W., Chung, C.K., Ireland, M., Gonzales, A., & Booth, R.J. (2007b). The
development and psychometric properties of LIWC2007. [Language manual]. Austin,
TX: LIWC.net
Pennebaker, J.W. & King, L.A. (1999). Linguistic styles: Language use as an individual difference.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1296-1312.
Simmons, R.A., Gordon, P.C., & Chambless, D.L. (2005). Pronouns in marital interaction:
What do “you” and “I” say about marital health? Psychological Science, 16, 932-936.
Smith, A.G., Suedfeld, P., Conway III, L.G., & Winter, D.G. (2008). The language of violence:
Distinguishing terrorist from nonterrorist groups by thematic content analysis.
Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, 1, 142-163.
Tausczik, Y.R., & Pennebaker, J.W. (2010). The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and
computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29,
24-54.
Toma, C. L., & Hancock, J. T. (2012). What lies beneath: the linguistic traces of deception in
online dating profiles. Journal of Communication, 62, 78-97.
Wierzbicka, A. (1997). The double life of a bilingual. In M.H. Bond (ed.), Working at the
interface of cultures (pp 113-125). London: Rutledge.
Wolf, M., Chung, C.K., & Kordy, H. (2010). Inpatient treatment to online aftercare: Emailing themes as a function of therapeutic outcomes. Psychotherapy Research, 20,
71-85.
Other Recommended Readings
Graesser, A.C., McNamara, D.S., Louwerse, M.M., & Cai, Z. (2004). Coh-Metrix: Analysis of
text on cohesion and language. Behavioral Research Methods, Instruments, and
Computers, 36, 193-202.
Gladwell, M. (2006). The formula: What if you built a machine to predict hit movies. The
New Yorker, October 16, 138-149.
Hancock, J.T., Bazarova, N., & Markowitz, D. (2011). Language, lies, and politics: A
linguistic analysis of the justifications for the Iraq War. Manuscript submitted for
publication.
Hart, W., & Albarracin, D. (2009). What I was doing versus what I did: Verb aspect
influences memory and future actions. Psychological Science, 20, 238-244.
Kramer, A. D. I. (2010). An unobtrusive behavioral model of "gross national happiness". In
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems (CHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 287-290.
DOI=10.1145/1753326.1753369
Mairesse, F., Walker, M.A., Mehl, M.R., & Moore, R.M. (in press). Using linguistic cues for the
automatic recognition of personality in conversation and text. Journal of Artificial
Intelligence Research.
McGlone, M.S., & Pfiester, R.A. (2008). Does time fly when you’re having fun, or do you?
Affect, agency, and embodiment in temporal communication. Journal of Language
and Social Psychology.
Pennebaker, J. W. (2011). The secret life of pronouns: What our words say about us. New
York: Bloomsbury Press.
Pennebaker, J.W., Mehl, M.R., & Niederhoffer, K. (2003). Psychological aspects of natural
language use: Our words, our selves. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 547-577.
Schober, M.F., & Brennan, S.E. (2003). Processes of interactive spoken discourse: The role
of the partner. In A.C. Graesser, M.A. Gernsbacher, & S.R. Goldman (Eds.), Handbook
of Discourse Processes (pp. 123-164). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Slobin, D. (1996). From “thought and language” to “thinking for speaking.” In J.J. Gumpers and C.
Levinson (Eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity (pps, 70-96). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press.
Solomon, R.C. (1978) A pronoun is a small world. Chicago Review, 29, 9-22.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1997). Understanding cultures through their key words. New York:
Oxford University Press