Eva-Maria Gortner
Sept. 17, 2001
Social Psychology of Language Use
Walter Weintraub
I. Basic Assumptions
 Weintraub started by examining the speech of his patients and correlated speaking styles with thinking
and behaving.
 Patterns of speech reflect important personality traits and how people deal with stress
 Main use of verbal behavior analysis: diagnosis of disorders and assessment of treatment response in
psychoanalytic therapy.
 Examples:
1. He found that impulsive inpatients and binge eaters used a lot more adversative expressions
(“but”, “however”, “nevertheless”) than a group of normal control subjects (Weintraub &
Aronson, 1964, 1969).
Adversative expressions = “undoing” in psychoanalytic terms
2. Obsessive-compulsive and delusional individuals have been found to use more causal words
(“explanatory expressions”) (Weintraub & Aronson, 1965, 1974).
Explanatory expressions = “rationalization” in psychoanalytic terms
II. Collection of Verbal Data
- Weintraub was primarily interested to examine verbal mannerisms as a way of determining how people
cope with stress, therefore he gathered samples of speech under moderately stressful conditions.
- He instructed his subjects to speak uninterruptedly for 10 minutes about any subject he or she thought
difficult yet manageable.
- For the analysis of an individual, minimum of 5000 words is sufficient (i.e. Presidents)
III. Categories of Verbal Behavior Analysis
15 Categories (he also likes to call them “grammatical structures”):
1. I – high: self-preoccupation, low: detachment
2. We –
Interesting distinctions:
- The “we” used in impersonal ways (“We won the Gulf War”) indicates a “detached and
impersonal manner of speaking”
- High we, low I: avoidance of intimacy, commitment, and responsibility, especially when
nonpersonal references are high.
3. Me – most intimate of personal pronouns, may reflect passivity
4. Negatives – may reflect denial and stubbornness.
5. Qualifiers – includes expressions of uncertainty (I think…), modifiers that weaken statements (kind of
spooky), and phrases of vagueness (we enjoyed what you might call an evening of relaxation).
6. Retractors – but, although, nevertheless.
7. Direct References – to a) persons listening, b) conditions under which the speaker is speaking (i.e.,
limited time), c) physical surroundings.
8. Explainers: are equal LIWC’s causal words (because, therefore…).
- High amount may indicate rationalizing, low amount may appear dogmatic and insensitive.
9. Expression of feeling – all emotion words except: impersonal statements (It was a terrifying incident),
expression of interest, physical sensations, and conditional feelings.
10. Evaluators – expressions of judgment, i.e. best, won’t work, sinful, should, right, nice. High use:
indicates psychopathology.
11. Adverbial Intensifiers – any adverbs that increase the force of a statement, i.e. really, so, extremely.
12. Nonpersonal references – clauses that refer to people not known to the speaker, also include
impersonal pronouns, universal subjects (i.e., “one”), references to animals.
13. Optional categories: creative expressions, rhetorical questions, interruptions
IV. Focus on Selected Categories
A. Emotions
- Weintraub found that emotional expression goes way beyond the use of emotion words. The following
categories were experimentally confirmed to convey emotion:
Eva-Maria Gortner
Sept. 17, 2001
-
Social Psychology of Language Use
1. The use of I rather than we
2. Adverbial intensifiers (absolutely, really) – marker for gender
3. Direct references (Can you help? Vs. Can somebody help?)
4. Expressions of feeling
5. Active rather than passive voice
6. Personal references (use of names rather than pronouns)
7. Commands
8. Evaluators (excellent, wonderful, horrible)
Depressed patients: use more I, direct references, evaluators, adverbial intensifiers, expression of
feeling, and the present tense. Passive expressions, such as high use of “me”, are also present.
B. Intimacy and Familiarity
- Main indicator: elliptical expressions.
- Ellipsis - the omission of a word or words from a sentence that would complete the meaning of the
statement. It depicts shared knowledge. Ex: The marathon is on the 15 th.
- Elliptical expressions, along with body movements and vocalization achieve intimacy through the
exclusion of others.
C. Verbal Reflections of Personality
- Personality traits that are reflected by grammatical choices:
1. Anxious Disposition – many first person singular references (self-preoccupation), explainers
and negatives (self-defensiveness), expression of feeling, evaluators, and adverbial
intensifiers (difficulty containing emotion), direct references (pleas for help).
2. Moodiness – high use of any indicators of emotion (see above); low use indicates an
emotionally controlled speaker
3. Angry Disposition – absence of qualifiers, high use of negatives, rhetorical questions, and
direct references
4. Oppositional Trait - high use of negatives
5. Controlling Behavior – low use of feelings and qualifiers (evidence of extensive preparation)
6. Histrionic – high use of adverbial intensifiers and evaluators
7. Achievement oriented – frequent use of personal pronouns in active voice (I, we) and
infrequent use of qualifiers (= careful planning and decisiveness)
8. Domineering behavior – use a lot of commands, verbosity, connectives (such as qualifiers,
retractors and explainers), interruptions and obscenities.
9. Resilience – the ability of a speaker to lose and then regain his or her verbal style during the
course of an interview or several interviews
10. Autonomy – low scores in emotion categories, low direct references and rhetorical questions
(all expressing the need for independence from others)
D. Spontaneity
- According to Weintraub’s psychoanalytic orientation, progress in therapy is marked by increases in
verbal spontaneity.
- Markers for spontaneity: qualifying phrases (I think, sort of, probably)
- In experiments of spontaneous speech, frequency of qualifying phrases is a measure of difficulty
in retrieving memories from long-term storage and encoding them into acceptable language.
- Other reasons for using qualifiers: indecisiveness as a personality trait, anxiety
- Anger and enthusiasm are inversely related to qualifiers use
E. Decision Making
- Patients who are incapacitated by compulsive rituals often have difficulty making the most routine
decisions. Their speech reflects more qualifiers and retractors: “I don’t think it’s hopeless or anything
but it’s sort of nebulous.”
- Paranoid patients use many qualifiers but few retractors. “Maybe I should distract my mind and get my
mind on interests of something else of another nature, that I may be able to completely get the thought
out of my mind.”
Eva-Maria Gortner
Sept. 17, 2001
Social Psychology of Language Use