James W. Pennebaker

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at University of Texas at Austin

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been previously explored for mental healthcare training and therapy client simulation, but they still fall short in authentically capturing diverse client traits and psychological conditions. We introduce \textbf{Eeyore}, an 8B model optimized for realistic depression simulation through a structured alignment frame...

Using social media data, the present study documents how three successive upheavals: the COVID pandemic, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests of 2020, and the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade interacted to impact the cognitive, emotional, and social styles of people in the US. Text analyses were conducted on 45,225,895 Reddit comm...

Using social media data, the present study documents how three successive upheavals: the COVID pandemic, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests of 2020, and the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 interacted to impact the cognitive, emotional, and social styles of people in the US. Text analyses were conducted on 45,225,895 Red...

This indispensable collection provides extensive, yet accessible, coverage of conceptual and practical issues in research design in personality and social psychology. Using numerous examples and clear guidelines, especially for conducting complex statistical analysis, leading experts address specific methods and areas of research to capture a defin...

Objective: Employing automated language analysis, specifically Meaning Extraction Method (MEM) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA), to identify key factors in open-text responses about hearing aid experiences. Design: Exploratory, cross-sectional design, using an online questionnaire. Responses to a single open-ended question were analysed us...

The ways people use language can reveal clues to their emotions, social behaviours, thinking styles, cultures and the worlds around them. In the past two decades, research at the intersection of social psychology and computer science has been developing tools to analyse natural language from written or spoken text to better understand social proces...

Objetivo: Las percepciones de los pacientes sobre su enfermedad tienen el poder de influir en los resultados de salud. Sin embargo, las mediciones existentes de creencias sobre la enfermedad pueden resultar arduas. El uso de nubes de palabras para ilustrar las experiencias de los pacientes es potencialmente una solución novedosa; pero faltan invest...

Background This study uses a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to test the health benefits of expressive writing that is culturally adapted for Chinese immigrant breast cancer survivors (BCSs) and to characterize how acculturation moderates the effects of expressive writing interventions. Methods We will recruit Chinese immigrant BCSs (N = 240) di...

Using social media data, the present study documents how three successive upheavals: the COVID pandemic, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests of 2020, and the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 interacted to impact the cognitive, emotional, and social styles of people in the US. Text analyses were conducted on 45,225,895 Red...

The COVID-19 pandemic posed a global threat to nearly every society around the world. Individuals turned to their political leaders to safely guide them through this crisis. The most direct way political leaders communicated with their citizens was through official speeches and press conferences. In this report, we compare psychological language ma...

The role of linguistic analysis in understanding human behaviour, emotions, and psychological states has gained significant prominence in various domains, including psychology, social sciences, and computational linguistics. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a widely used tool, developed by American social psychologist James W. Penneb...

Large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's GPT-4, Google's Bard or Meta's LLaMa, have created unprecedented opportunities for analysing and generating language data on a massive scale. Because language data have a central role in all areas of psychology, this new technology has the potential to transform the field. In this Perspective, we revie...

Background: Expressive writing and motivational interviewing are well-known approaches to help patients cope with stressful life events. While these methods are often applied by human counselors, it is less well understood if an automated AI approach can benefit patients. Providing an automated method would help expose a wider range of people to t...

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Google’s Bard, have created unprecedented opportunities for analyzing and generating language data on a massive scale. Because language is core to all areas of psychology, this new technology holds the potential to transform the field. In this Review, we first present emerging applications of...

Scholars across disciplines have long debated the existence of a common structure that underlies narratives. Using computer-based language analysis methods, several structural and psychological categories of language were measured across ~40,000 traditional narratives (e.g., novels and movie scripts) and ~20,000 nontraditional narratives (science r...

As social media has proliferated, a key aspect to making meaningful connections with people online has been revealing important parts of one’s identity. In this work, we study changes that occur in people’s language use after they share a specific piece of their identity: a depression diagnosis. To do so, we collect data from over five thousand use...

Lifelong experiences and learned knowledge lead to shared expectations about how common situations tend to unfold. Such knowledge of narrative event flow enables people to weave together a story. However, comparable computational tools to evaluate the flow of events in narratives are limited. We quantify the differences between autobiographical and...

Speech is a powerful medium through which a variety of psychologically relevant phenomena are expressed. Here we take a first step in evaluating the potential of using voice samples as non-self-report measures of personality. In particular, we examine the extent to which linguistic and vocal information extracted from semi-structured vocal samples...

This collection of first-person accounts from legendary social psychologists tells the stories behind the science and offers unique insight into the development of the field from the 1950s to the present. One pillar, the grandson of a slave, was inspired by Kenneth Clark. Yet when he entered his PhD program in the 1960s, he was told that race was n...

To what degree can we determine people's connections with groups through the language they use? In recent years, large archives of behavioral data from social media communities have become available to social scientists, opening the possibility of tracking naturally occurring group identity processes. A feature of most digital groups is that they r...

BACKGROUND Expressive writing and motivational interviewing are well-known approaches to help patients cope with stressful life events. Although these methods are often applied by human counselors, it is less well understood if an automated artificial intelligence approach can benefit patients. Providing an automated method would help expose a wide...

The words that people use in everyday life tell us about their psychological states: their beliefs, emotions, thinking habits, lived experiences, social relationships, and personalities. From the time of Freud’s writings about “slips of the tongue” to the early days of computer-based text analysis, researchers across the social sciences have amasse...

The mental health of college students is a growing concern, and gauging the mental health needs of college students is difficult to assess in real-time and in scale. To address this gap, researchers and practitioners have encouraged the use of passive technologies. Social media is one such "passive sensor" that has shown potential as a viable "pass...

Lifelong experiences and learned knowledge lead to shared expectations about how common situations tend to unfold. Such knowledge enables people to interpret story narratives and identify salient events effortlessly. We study differences in the narrative flow of events in autobiographical versus imagined stories using GPT-3, one of the largest neur...

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 current research chronicles the unfolding of the early psychological impacts of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) by analyzing Reddit language from 18 U.S. cities (200,000+ people) and large-scale survey data (11,000+ people). Large psychological shifts were found reflecting three distinct phases. When COVID-19 warnings first emerged (“warnin...

Most scientists agree that climate change is the largest existential threat of our time. Despite the magnitude of the threat, surprisingly few climate-related discussions take place on social media. What factors drive online discussions about climate change? In this study, we examined the occurrence of Reddit discussions around three types of clima...

Purpose Online reviews have been used by hearing aid owners to share their experiences and to provide suggestions to potential hearing aid buyers, although they have not been systematically examined. The study was aimed at examining the hearing aid consumer reviews using automated linguistic analysis, and how the linguistic variables relate to self...

How do people communicate with others once they begin harboring a major life secret? Sixty-one adults who started keeping a major secret within the past several years agreed to have their email correspondence analyzed. Changes in emailing frequency and word use between secret keepers and their contacts were identified from before and during secret...

The anti-vaccination movement threatens public health by reducing the likelihood of disease eradication. With social media’s purported role in disseminating anti-vaccine information, it is imperative to understand the drivers of attitudes among participants involved in the vaccination debate on a communication channel critical to the movement: Twit...

Objective To explore the publicised opinions of consumers actively participating in online hearing aid reviews. Design A retrospective design examining data generated from an online consumer review website (www.HearingTracker.com). Qualitative data (open text responses) were analysed using the open source automated topic modelling software IRaMuTe...

TED talks are a popular internet forum where new ideas and research are presented by a wide variety of speakers. In this study, we investigated how the language used in TED talks influenced popularity and viewer ratings. We also investigated the differences in linguistic style and ratings of talks given by academics and non‐academics. The transcrip...

Background / Introduction. This work explores the relationship between a person's demographic/psychological traits (e.g., gender, personality) and self-identity images and captions. Methods. We use a dataset of images and captions provided by N ≈ 1, 350 individuals, and we automatically extract features from both the images and captions. Results. W...

Significance By analyzing language on the social media platform Reddit, we tracked people’s social, cognitive, and emotional lives as they dealt with the breakup of a close intimate relationship. Language markers can detect impending relationship breakups up to 3 mo before they occur, with continued psychological aftereffects lasting 6 mo after the...

The mental health of college students is a growing concern, and gauging the mental health needs of college students is difficult to assess in real-time and in scale. While social media has shown potential as a viable "passive sensor" of mental health, the construct validity and in-practice reliability of such computational assessments remain largel...

The mental health of college students is a growing concern, and gauging the mental health needs of college students is difficult to assess in real-time and in scale. While social media has shown potential as a viable “passive sensor” of mental health, the construct validity and in-practice reliability of such computational assessments remain largel...

While language style is considered to be automatic and relatively stable, its plasticity has not yet been studied in translations that require the translator to “step into the shoes of another person.” In the present study, we propose a psychological model of language adaptation in translations. Focusing on an established interindividual difference...

The initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the lives of people across the globe. The current research sought to understand how the pandemic affected people’s social and psychological states during the first three months after the first U.S. death was reported. How did people’s emotions, thought patterns, and social lives change as the pand...

The huge power for social influence of digital media may come with the risk of intensifying common societal biases, such as gender and age stereotypes. Speaker’s gender and age also behaviorally manifest in language use, and language may be a powerful tool to shape impact. The present study took the example of TED, a highly successful knowledge dis...

Purpose: The barriers generally facing women wishing to pursue careers in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) in the United States have been well described. However, additional layers of cultural beliefs and needs may pose further obstructions to women in certain cultural subgroups who wish to ente...

To date we know little about natural emotion word repertoires, and whether or how they are associated with emotional functioning. Principles from linguistics suggest that the richness or diversity of individuals' actively used emotion vocabularies may correspond with their typical emotion experiences. The current investigation measures active emoti...

Scholars across disciplines have long debated the existence of a common structure that underlies narratives. Using computer-based language analysis methods, several structural and psychological categories of language were measured across ~40,000 traditional narratives (e.g., novels and movie scripts) and ~20,000 nontraditional narratives (science r...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has raised concerns for many regarding personal and public health implications, financial security and economic stability. Alongside many other unprecedented challenges, there are increasing concerns over social isolation and mental health. We introduce \textit{Expressive Interviewing}--an interview-style conversationa...

When people communicate with each other, their choice of what to say is tied to their perceptions of the audience. For many communication channels, people have some ability to explicitly specify their audience members and the different roles they can play. While existing accounts of communication behavior have largely focused on how people tailor t...

Advances in mobile and wearable technologies mean it is now feasible to record hours to days of participant behavior in its naturalistic context, a great boon for psychologists interested in family processes and development. While automated activity recognition algorithms exist for a limited set of behaviors, time-consuming human annotations are st...

It is often assumed that people who use rich emotional vocabularies are emotionally healthier than those who express themselves using a narrower range of emotion words. However, the relevant research relies on passive presentation of experimenter-generated emotion words. To date we know little about natural emotion word repertoires, and whether or...

Poster available from here: https://osf.io/h8ypt/

Individuals who are “strongly fused” with a group view the group as self-defining. As such, they should be particularly reluctant to leave it. For the first time, we investigate the implications of identity fusion for university retention. We found that students who were strongly fused with their university (+1 SD) were 7–9% points more likely than...

Do in-class discussion groups lead to improved learning for individual group members? Analyses of over 1600 students’ language samples from 4800+ online discussion groups revealed that markers of linguistic engagement were highly predictive of academic outcomes.

Narcissism is unrelated to using first-person singular pronouns. Whether narcissism is linked to other language use remains unclear. We aimed to identify linguistic markers of narcissism. We applied the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to texts (k = 15; N = 4,941). The strongest positive correlates were using words related to sports, second-person...

Narcissism is unrelated to using first-person singular pronouns. Whether narcissism is linked to other language use remains unclear. We aimed to identify linguistic markers of narcissism. We applied the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to texts (k = 15; N = 4,941). The strongest positive correlates were: using words related to sports, second-perso...

Narcissism is unrelated to using first-person singular pronouns. Whether narcissism is linked to other language use remains unclear. We aimed to identify linguistic markers of narcissism. We applied the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to texts (k = 15; N = 4,941). The strongest positive correlates were: using words related to sports, second-perso...

Personal writings have inspired researchers in the fields of linguistics and psychology to study the relationship between language and culture to better understand the psychology of people across different cultures. In this paper, we explore this relation by developing cross-cultural word models to identify words with cultural bias-i.e., words that...

Background Google searches are now a popular way for individuals to seek information about the significance of common symptoms and whether they should seek medical assistance. As analysis of search patterns may help understand the demand for medical care, we examined what times over a 24-hour period and on what days of the week people searched Goog...

College students’ study strategies were explored by tracking the ways they navigated the websites of two large (Ns of 1384 and 671) online introductory psychology courses. Students’ study patterns were measured analyzing the ways they clicked outside of the regularly scheduled class on study materials within the online Learning Management System. T...

Time-based component loadings. (DOCX)

Correlations between overall clicking and demographic variables. (DOCX)

Base rates and factor loadings for click location. (DOCX)

Regression table for SAT and overall clicking as predictors of grade. (DOCX)

Correlations with overall clicks SAT and grade. (DOCX)

Objective To understand what terms people seeking information about gout use most frequently in online searches and to explore the psychological and emotional tone of these searches. Methods A large de‐identified data set of search histories from major search engines was analyzed. Participants who searched for gout (n = 1,117), arthritis (arthriti...

In this manual, we introduce a new version of the German adaptation of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), called the DE-LIWC2015. The aim of the present work was to develop an update to the previous version of the German LIWC adaptation (Wolf et al., 2008) that corresponds to the LIWC2015 properties. The overall goal was to enable automa...

Significance Donald Trump and a small group of emerging leaders around the world have been labeled as outliers in the ways that they think and communicate with others. Are they really anomalies, or do they fit into larger political trends? This study adds to existing scholarship by analyzing two important psychological dimensions, analytic thinking...

Supplementary Information for: Jordan, K. N., Sterling, J., Pennebaker, J. W., & Boyd, R. L. (2019). Examining long-term trends in politics and culture through language of political leaders and cultural institutions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201811987. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1811987116

How is the natural language of feedback affected when instructors are White and learners are minorities? The present research addressed this question using a website called Feedback Forward through which White undergraduates provided extensive open-ended responses on a poorly written essay supposedly drafted by either a Black or a White fellow stud...

Converging investigations on the part of multiple agencies/agents have provided overwhelming evidence for Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As a part (and consequence) of recent reports, multiple datasets that capture actions taken by actors of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), have been released to the public. In the c...

Narcissism is virtually unrelated to using first-person singular pronouns (Carey et al., [2015] Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109). The degree to which narcissism is linked to other aspects of language use, however, remains unclear. We conducted a multi-site, multi-measure, and dual-language project to identify potential linguistic...

The 2016 election provided more language and polling data than any previous election. In addition, the election spurred a new level of social media coverage. The current study analyzed the language of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton from the debates as well as the tweets of millions of people during the fall presidential campaign. In addition, agg...

Depressive symptomatology is manifested in greater first-person singular pronoun use (i.e., I-talk), but when and for whom this effect is most apparent, and the extent to which it is specific to depression or part of a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk, remains unclear. Using pooled data from N = 4,754 participants from 6...

Depressive symptomatology is manifested in greater first-person singular pronoun use (i.e., I-talk), but when and for whom this effect is most apparent, and the extent to which it is specific to depression or part of a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk, remains unclear. Using pooled data from N = 4,754 participants from 6...

Background Previous research has shown a link between low positive affect and mortality, but questions remain about how positive affect is related to mortality and how this differs by gender and age. Purpose To investigate the relationships between positive affect, negative affect, and mortality in a general population sample, and to examine wheth...

The 1997 Psychological Science paper “Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process” summarized the results of several expressive writing studies. Since the publication of the first expressive writing study in 1986, a number of discoveries had emerged that had both theoretical and clinical implications. The scientific and personal ba...

Humans upload over 1.8 billion digital images to the internet each day, yet the relationship between the images that a person shares with others and his/her psychological characteristics remains poorly understood. In the current research, we analyze the relationship between images, captions, and the latent demographic/psychological dimensions of pe...

The results of the 2016 presidential election left many political scholars perplexed. Why was Donald Trump elected and what was his appeal? Does he represent a new way of thinking or is he merely an extension of trends that have long been in place? The answer to some of these questions may be found in the language of political figures from Trump ba...

If you have to socially reject someone, will it help to apologize? Social rejection is a painful emotional experience for targets, yet research has been silent on recommendations for rejectors. Across three sets of studies, apologies increased hurt feelings and the need to express forgiveness but did not increase feelings of forgiveness. The invest...

Personality is typically defined as the consistent set of traits, attitudes, emotions, and behaviors that people have. For several decades, a majority of researchers have tacitly agreed that the gold standard for measuring personality was with self-report questionnaires. Surveys are fast, inexpensive, and display beautiful psychometric properties....

The linguistic category model (LCM) seeks to understand social psychological processes through the lens of language use. Its original development required human judges to analyze natural language to understand how people assess actions, states, and traits. The current project sought to computerize the LCM assessment based on an idea of language abs...

The ways we express ourselves in writing and speaking reveal who we are. Historically, most psychologists, social media experts, and even computer scientists have focused more on what people were saying rather than how they were saying what they were saying. Language content is, of course, critical to basic communication. Equally interesting is an...

We present a methodology based on topic modeling that can be used to identify and quantify sociolinguistic differences between groups of people, and describe a regression method that can disentangle the influences of different attributes of the people in the group (e.g., culture, gender, age). As an example, we explore the concept of personal value...

The words people use in their conversations, emails, and diaries can tell us how they think, approach problems, connect with others, and their behaviors. Of particular interest are people's use of function words -- pronouns, articles, and other small and forgettable words. Processed in the brain differently from content words, function words reveal...

Scientists Making a Difference is a fascinating collection of first-person narratives from the top psychological scientists of the modern era. These readable essays highlight the most important contributions to theory and research in psychological science, show how the greatest psychological scientists formulate and think about their work, and illu...