The Psychological Functions of Function Words Cindy Chung and James Pennebaker

1. The Psychological Functions of Function WordsCindy Chung and James Pennebaker And perhaps also Measurement of Negativity Bias in Personal Narratives Using Corpus-Based Emotion Dictionaries Shuki J. Cohen Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

2. Function Words • Content words: nouns and regular verbs • Function words: pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs. Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

3. Fn words factoids • vocabulary of well over 100,000 words, fewer than 400 are function words (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & Gulikers, 1995). • Neo-Zipfian factoid: less than 0.04% of our vocabulary accounts for over half of the words we use in daily speech (Rochon, Saffran, Berndt, & Schwartz, 2000). • Despite the frequency of their use, they are the hardest to master when learning a new language (Weber-Fox & Neville, 2001). • We don’t remember the usage of fn words • We have little control over the usage frequency of fn words Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

4. Mind and Brain factoids of fn words • Damage to Wernicke’s area – damage to content words (Miller, 1995). • Damage to Broca’s area – damage to speech speed and fn words • Function words vary according to psychological states and personalities • Allport (1961) emphasized the idea of stylistic behaviors or, more broadly, personality styles. • [authorship attribution: “whilst” in Federalist Papers. (Mosteller and Wallace, 1964) ] Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

5. Methodological issues • Self reports tend to reflect speaker’s theory of self, rather than true self condition; cheap to collect • Analyzing the specific meaning of content words in context; tedious and expensive (manual work). • Bag of words? • Analyzing words is easy with the advancement of computers and electronic text. • problematic; ignores context, idioms • Fn words don’t have that problem • forced looking at word usage, not (only?) broader word meaning Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

6. Effects of what? • How can we say that the various effects that we have discussed reflect function word differences and not differences in content or context? • Perhaps these effects are merely reflections of differences in syntax. • People can choose the content words (where and what to talk about), but less so the fn words? Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

7. Reflect of Affect? • Do function words reflect or influence psychological state? • reflection of cog state? • a Whorfian view? • They failed to make people changethe pronouns they used (from I to We)in order to feel part of a group , and so they take it to be supporting a cog reflection view. Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

8. Some more big words • “We are now standing at the gates of a new age of understanding the links between language and personality” Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

9. LIWC • Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, or LIWC (Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2001). • human judgments for how 2000 words or word stems were related to each of several dozen categories. • Found connection b/w words used and health states after trauma Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

10. Function of what again? • All function words? • Not really. • Most frequent nn function words? • Not really. • Only Pronouns? • Not really. • Only I! • And a few other pronouns in comparison to I. Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

11. Testosterone! • Lower levels – less usage of “I”. • but found no other linguistic correlates to mood etc. Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

12. Where does depression hurt? • In your “I”! • use of first person singular is associated with negative affective states (Weintraub, 1989). • currently depressed > formerly depressed > never depressed students. In writing about coming to college (Rude, Gortner, & Pennebaker, 2004). • Also in natural speech (Mehl, 2004). • In both studies, pronouns are a better marker of depression than negative emotion words. • analysis of the poetry of suicidal versus non-suicidal poets Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

13. Individual Stress • Text analyses of Giuliani’s press conferences in the months surrounding his personal upheavals: use of “I”/”me” up from 2% of his words to over 7% (Pennebaker & Lay, 2002). • In Guiliani’s press conferences during his first four years of mayor, he used “we” words at exceptionally high rates – over 2.5%. When his life fell apart, this rate dropped to the normal 1%. • his use of “we” words in his early mayor period was judged as marked by distanced or royal “we” words; but his post-9/11 “we” words referred to specific individuals or identifiable groups. Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

14. Socially-shared stress • usage of third person indicates healthy mental state. • Switching from high rates of “I” to high rates of other personal pronouns when writing about emotional upheavals in their lives --> greater health improvements in the months after writing (Campbell & Pennebaker, 2003). • Used LSA. Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

15. Sad is not Depressed • relatively healthy people facing the upheavals of 9/11 actually evidenced a drop in “I” words rather than an increase. Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

16. Deception • when people have been induced to describe or explain something honestly or deceptively, the combined use of first person singular pronouns and exclusive words predicts honesty (Newman, Pennebaker, Berry, & Richards, 2003). Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

17. Status • In dyads: person whose use of “I” words is lower tends to be the higher status participant. • In the analysis of the incoming and outgoing emails of 11 undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty, the rated status of the interactant was correlated −.40 with the relative use of “I” words (Pennebaker & Davis, 2006). • Duh! • Me: “I did X and Y…” • Advisor: “Why haven’t you done Z??” Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

18. Gender • females use first person singular pronouns more than males. Newman et al. (2003) • females are generally more self-focused than men? • more prone to depression than men? • have traditionally held lower status positions relative to men? • Males use more articles and nouns in natural speech and writing (categorization, concrete thinking?). females use more (especially auxiliary) verbs (relational orientations?) Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

19. Age • people use fewer first person singular words and more first person plural words with age Pennebaker and Stone (2003). • greater use of exclusive words • as people age they make more distinctions and psychologically distance themselves from their topics. • older people speak with greater cog complexity. • use more future tense and less past tense the older they get. Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

20. Culture (cross-linguistic) • first person plural pronouns: USA and Japan use them in a close, personal way at the same rates. • American authors used first person plural pronouns in a distant, royal-we way at double the rate that was found in the Japanese texts. • This accounted for the overall greater rate of first person plural pronouns in American than in Japanese texts. • counter to stereotypes, the Japanese texts used first person singular pronouns at a higher rate than did American texts. • American texts were higher in their use of first person plural pronouns (Chung & Pennebaker, 2005). Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

21. More cultural speculations • overall, “I” use reflects self-focus. • focus on the self is required to achieve collectivistic values such as harmony, empathy, and self-criticism to please the ingroup (e.g. Kanagawa, Cross, & Markus, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991), • use of “we”: feelings of closeness and of sharing a common fate with another, more than “Other and I” (Fitzsimmons & Kay, 2004), “they”, or “it” (Brewer & Gardner, 1996). Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

22. Culture III • western philosophy more on categorization, eastern asian philosophy more on movement and process. • Translations from Japanese contain lesser fn words such as a, an, the, that come before nouns (categories) (Chung & Pennebaker, 2005). • [what about individual findings replicated in other languages?] Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

23. Socially-shared stress II • In community-wide upheaval, use of first person plural pronouns increases: • chat room discussions after Princess Diana’s death (Stone & Pennebaker, 2002); newspaper accounts of the Texas A&M Bonfire tragedy (Gortner & Pennebaker, 2003); over 1000 bloggers who were tracked in the months before and after 9/11 (Cohn, Mehl, & Pennebaker, 2004); Also in speech (Mehl & Pennebaker, 2003). Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

24. Shuki Cohen Measurement of Negativity Bias in Personal Narratives Using Corpus-Based Emotion Dictionaries Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

25. Neurotics and Friends • Theory assumes neurotics is a problem in emotional processing and expresses in languages b/c language also uses emotional info processing. • Neurotics selectively attend to, interpret, and recall neg charged and ambig event • people with negative affectivity, depressive self-schema, dysphoric, Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

26. theory-driven • Theory assumes pos and neg words are independent. • Checks if correlation exists b/w usage of a-priori (?) suspected words and mental health indices • Unlike Empirical approach: • index all words of neurotics and non-neurotics and find subset that gives best discrimination Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

27. Materials • Usage of (transcribed) speech, not text • Self report questionnaires susceptive to introspective limits, self-deception, defensiveness • Narratives about self or sig. other • Narratives on other persons were not found useful (not correlating mental health states) • Emotional word list dictionaries • filtered by usage (e.g., “like”, pretty” etc. although positive, are mainly used as intensifiers, hence “diluting” the positive meaning). • Used both manually constructed lists from patients’ narratives and existing dictionaries. Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

28. Evaluation • Manual evaluations • Slow, expensive • Subject to rater drift and biases • Automatic evaluations (corpus-based) • Fast • Showed better results in some studies assessing mental health • Interesting for us! Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

29. Emotion lists • Two master lists: Positive list, negative list • Exception list for each • Idioms / ngrams without the same emotional value: “alright” is positive, but “it was alright, I guess” – quite neurtal • Negations - up to 3 tokens apart • cannot handle double neg, as we mentioned last time • claims not to find statistically enough cases of double neg in pilot study. • “like” is filtered from positive list, but “didn’t like” is useful in neg list! Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

30. Results • Found higher correlations / effects than Pennebaker • Mental health indices are highly correlated with usage of negativity in speech • Pennebaker found sig corr. with indices of mental health, but very small effects • Here the magnitude of the effects is better, and more correlated Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group

31. Fine Correlations • Not a single count: not subtracting neg counts from pos counts. • Positive Correlation between psychological profile (neuroticism level by questionnaires) and counts of negative normalized by total tokens (not pos-neg), • negative correlation with counts of pos words. • But not necessarily neg correlation b/w pos and neg words! Yuval Marton, Sentiment Analysis Reading Group