Cindy K Chung

University of Texas at Austin | UT · Department of Psychology

The smallest and most commonly used words in English are pronouns, articles, and other function words. Almost invisible to the reader or writer, function words can reveal ways people think and approach topics. A computerized text analysis of over 50,000 college admissions essays from more than 25,000 entering students found a coherent dimension of...

Clinicians often wonder if the single sentence from the Folstein Mini-Mental Status Exam (MMSE) offers meaningful information about the patient. We compared single sentences derived from the MMSE generated by 3 groups of participants — hospitalized medically-ill patients with psychiatric comorbidity, hospitalized medically-ill patients without psyc...

Background: Language use is often disrupted in patients with schizophrenia; novel computational approaches may provide new insights. Aims: To test word use patterns as markers of the perceptual, cognitive and social experiences characteristic of schizophrenia. Method: Word counting software was applied to first-person accounts of schizophrenia...

Alcohol's function as a regulator of emotions has long been denoted in figures of speech, most famously 'in vino, veritas' (in wine, truth). In contrast, we ask whether an individual's self-reported alcohol consumption and related attitudes can be correlated with the words they use to write about alcohol. Participants completed an open-ended essay...

A “spontaneous approach” was used to define self-schemas within and across cultures. Specifically, self-schemas were extracted from open-ended personality descriptions from Americans (n = 560) and Mexicans (n = 496) using the Meaning Extraction Method (MEM). The MEM relies on text analytic tools and factor analyses to learn about the most salient a...

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007) is a word counting software program that references a dictionary of grammatical, psychological, and content word cat-egories. LIWC has been used to efficiently classify texts along psychological dimensions and to predict behavioral outcomes, making it a text analysis tool...

This paper presents a broad overview of the expressive writing paradigm. Since its first use in the 1980s, dozens of studies have explored the parameters and boundary conditions of its effectiveness. In the laboratory, consistent and significant health improvements are found when individuals write or talk about personally upsetting experiences. The...

LIWC is, originally, a text analysis program that counts words of English texts in psychologically meaningful categories. It provides an analysis (in percentage) for 80 dimensions of language (functional words, topics, punctuation). The goal of this methodological note is to present the French LIWC. This version respects the structure of the catego...

Previous studies suggest that those who naturally vary their pronoun use over the course of expressive writing subsequently report the greatest improvements in physical and mental health. To explore possible perspective taking or perspective switching effects, two studies manipulated writing perspectives about emotional events from either a first-p...

Social Language Processing (SLP) is introduced as an interdisciplinary approach to assess social features in communications by terrorist organizations and authoritarian regimes. The SLP paradigm represents a rapprochement of theories, tools and techniques from cognitive science, communications, computational linguistics, discourse processing, langu...

The authors applied the meaning extraction method (MEM) to 4,241 e-mails written by 297 participants of an email-based aftercare program following inpatient psychotherapy. Principal-components analysis of the most frequently used nouns in the e-mails yielded nine components: life decisions and coping, relationship conflict, psychological and physic...

In a test to determine whether a brief version of the expressive writing (EW) method was viable, 106 college students participated in an experiment dealing with the study of life transitions. Individuals were randomly assigned to write for 15 minutes on three occasions: either three times separated by 10-min break (1-hour condition), 35-min break (...

A new method for extracting common themes from written text is introduced and applied to 1165 open-ended self-descriptive narratives. Drawing on a lexical approach to personality, the most commonly-used adjectives within narratives written by college students were identified using computerized text analytic tools. A factor analysis on the use of th...

We explore the emerging phenomenon of blogging about personal goals, and demonstrate how natural language processing tools can be used to uncover psychologically meaningful constructs in blogs. We describe features of a blog community (2638 blogs) devoted to weight loss. We compare several approaches to text analysis in predicting weight loss from...

The present studies demonstrate two computerized approaches to examining the expression of depression on the Internet. Study 1 observed linguistic markers of depression in English and Spanish forums. English and Spanish posts by depressed (N=160) and non-depressed individuals (N=160) were collected from Internet forums using bulletin board systems...

The authors of this study provided basic descriptive data on the correlation between personality tests and Korean language use. Native Korean-speaking students (N = 80) at Pusan National University completed 2 personality tests, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI; I. B. Myers, M. H. McCaulley, N. L. Quenk, & A. L. Hammer, 1998) and the 5-Factor...

The present study examines the personalities and psychological states of the 2004 candidates for U.S. president and vice president through their use of words. The transcripts of 271 televised interviews, press conferences, and campaign debates of John Kerry, John Edwards, George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney between January 4 and November 3, 2004 were a...

Language is the currency of most human social processes. We use words to convey our emotions and thoughts, to tell stories, and to understand the world. It is somewhat odd, then, that so few investigations in the social sciences actually focus on natural language use among people in the real world. There are many legitimate reasons for not studying...

What can we learn about presidential candidates by examining their speech in natural conversation? In the present study, the television interviews from the 2004 Democratic presidential primary campaign of John Kerry (N= 29) and John Edwards (N= 34) were examined using linguistic analyses. Results indicate that Kerry and Edwards were similar in thei...

The Social Stage Model of Disasters is examined as a parallel to natural responses to terrorism. After a shared upheaval, people tend to go through an emergency phase, where they talk about the event, followed by a drop in talking during a longer inhibition phase. Thoughts of the event still weigh heavily on people's minds until the adaptation phas...

Quality of life (QOL) is a broad, multiply determined construct with both objective and subjective components. Objective indicators of QOL can include physiological markers of fitness and disease, a nation's Gross Domestic Products, marital status, church attendance, or even the number of minutes per day spent laughing. But objec-tive indicators do...