Some Helpful Political and Language-Related References

Political Analyses of Public Figures

Pennebaker, J.W. & Lay, T.C. (2002). Language use and personality during crises: Analyses of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's press conferences. Journal of Research in Personality, 36, 271-282. Linguistic analyses of the way Giuliani changed in his use of language from his first years as mayor through his personal crises in mid-2000 and in the aftermath of theWorld Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001.

Pennebaker, J.W., Slatcher, R.B., & Chung, C.K. (2005). Linguistic markers of psychological state through media interviews: John Kerry and John Edwards in 2004, Al Gore in 2000. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 5, 1-9. An analysis of the language use of John Kerry and John Edwards in televised interviews during the Democratic presidential campaign.

Pennebaker, J.W. & Chung, C.K. (in press). Computerized text analysis of Al-Qaeda transcripts. In K. Krippendorff and M. Bock (Eds), A content analysis reader. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Slatcher, R.B., Chung, C.K., Pennebaker, J.W., & Stone, L.D. (2007). Winning words: Individual differences in linguistic style among U.S. presidential and vice presidential candidates. Journal of Research in Personality, 41, 63-75. The candidates in the 2004 presidential election used language in strikingly different ways.

Niederhoffer, K.G. & Pennebaker, J.W. (2002). Linguistic style matching in social interaction. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 21, 337-360. When two people are talking, they match each other’s linguistic style on a conversation and on a turn-by-turn level. Includes analysis of conversations from the Watergate tapes.

Broader Articles on Language, Personality, and Social Processes

Chung, C.K. & Pennebaker, J.W. (2007). The psychological function of function words. In K. Fiedler (Ed.), Social communication: Frontiers of social psychology (pp 343-359). New York: Psychology Press. A summary of recent findings concerning the links between pronouns, prepositions, and other function words with markers of social and personality processes.

Pennebaker, J.W. & King, L.A. (1999). Linguistic styles: Language use as an individual difference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1296-1312. A series of studies that reveal how language use reflects personality, health, and social behaviors.

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. A general review of text analysis approaches in the social sciences -- with primary attention to word count strategies. This extensive literature review also summarizes work linking pronouns, prepositions, and other particles to social, personality, and clinical psychology.

Specific studies linking language with social and personality dynamics

Cohn, M.A., Mehl, M.R., & Pennebaker, J.W. (2004). Linguistic markers of psychological change surrounding September 11, 2001. Psychological Science, 15, 687-693. An analysis of over 1000 people who wrote online journals in the weeks before and after September 11.

Newman, M.L., Pennebaker, J.W., Berry, D.S., & Richards, J.M. (2003). Lying words: Predicting deception from linguistic style. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29, 665-675. An analysis of 5 studies where participants lied and/or told the truth. Truth-tellers use more 1st person singular words, markers of cognitive complexity, and fewer negative emotion words.

Stirman, S.W., & Pennebaker, J.W. (2001). Word use in the poetry of suicidal and non-suicidal poets. Psychosomatic Medicine 63, 517-522. A text analysis of the poetry of poets who committed suicide vs a matched control who did not -- promising evidence for the power of linguistic tools to understand psychological state.