Google Books putting millions of searchable volumes online has opened possibilities for scholars of all sorts, including psychologists interested in analyzing the predictive nature of language. James Pennebaker, chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, has done such a study resulting in the book, The Secret Life of Pronouns. It’s not the point of Pennebaker’s study, but I’ve often wondered if the type of language we use changes if we are developing a serious illness but not yet aware of it. It’s really easy to read signifiers in retrospect, but perhaps they can be deciphered to predict likelihood of sickness, at least until we have a foolproof biological means of predetermining such things. From a Scientific American interview with Pennebaker conducted by Garreth Cook:
“COOK: How did you become interested in pronouns?
PENNEBAKER: A complete and total accident. Until recently, I never thought about parts of speech. However, about ten years ago I stumbled on some findings that caught my attention. In the 1980s, my students and I discovered that if people were asked to write about emotional upheavals, their physical health improved. Apparently, putting emotional experiences into language changed the ways people thought about their upheavals. In an attempt to better understand the power of writing, we developed a computerized text analysis program to determine how language use might predict later health improvements. In other words, I wanted to find if there was a healthy way to write.
Much to my surprise, I soon discovered that the ways people used pronouns in their essays predicted whose health would improve the most. Specifically, those people who benefited the most from writing changed in their pronoun use from one essay to another. Pronouns were reflecting people’’s abilities to change perspective.
As I pondered these findings, I started looking at how people used pronouns in other texts — blogs, emails, speeches, class writing assignments, and natural conversation. Remarkably, how people used pronouns was correlated with almost everything I studied. For example, use of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) was consistently related to gender, age, social class, honesty, status, personality, and much more. Although the findings were often robust, people in daily life were unable to pick them up when reading or listening to others. It was almost as if there was a secret world of pronouns that existed outside our awareness.”
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Dr. Pennebaker on the psychological benefits of writing: