Cindy K. Chung

Variations in the spacing of expressive writing sessions.

OBJECTIVES 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. DESIGN 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 (3-hour condition), or 24-hour break (3-day condition). METHODS Participants were randomly assigned to write about their thoughts and feelings about the transitions (N=80), or to describe daily behaviours surrounding the transitions in a non-emotional way (N=26). RESULTS The three emotional writing conditions did not vary in terms of their engagement with writing, their emotional reactions, short- or long-term reactions to the intervention. Compared to controls, those in the experimental conditions evidenced fewer symptom reports 9 months after writing. CONCLUSIONS The findings suggest that a brief 1-hour EW is more emotionally demanding, but that it has comparable effects on physical symptoms as the traditional 3-day method.

The Relations Between Personality and Language Use

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 Inventory (O. P. John, E. M. Donahue, & R. L. Kentle, 1991). They completed a stream-of-consciousness essay, which the authors analyzed using the Korean version of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (KLIWC; C. H. Lee, J. Shim, & A. Yoon, 2005). Personality traits were significantly correlated with linguistic variables. Furthermore, the observed correlations between the two types of variables in Korean were consistent with the results of previous LIWC studies conducted in English. The authors discuss language use as a marker of personality.

Experimental manipulations of perspective taking and perspective switching in expressive writing

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-person, second-person, or third-person perspective. In Study 1, 55 students were randomly assigned to one of the three writing perspectives and were asked to write from the same perspective for three 5-minute writing sessions. In Study 2, 129 students wrote for three 5-minute sessions, one from each perspective in a counterbalanced order. The results showed that writing from a first-person perspective conferred more perceived benefits and was associated with using more cognitive mechanism words, whether engaged in perspective taking or perspective switching.

Inpatient treatment to online aftercare: e-mailing themes as a function of therapeutic outcomes.

Abstract 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 physical symptoms, family of origin, social and leisure activities, present family and household, treatment, exercise and diet, and work. Relative to men, women focused more on symptoms, exercise and diet, and family of origin, but less on work. Older participants were more likely to e-mail about their present family. Younger participants were more likely to e-mail about their family of origin and exercise and diet. Patients who showed no therapeutic gains during their prior treatment wrote more about symptoms than patients who had improved. The potentials and limitations of the MEM for the analysis of therapy corpora are discussed.

Social language processing: A framework for analyzing the communication of terrorists and authoritarian regimes

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, language studies and social psychology. The SLP paradigm consists of three broad stages: (1) linguistic feature identification; (2) linguistic feature extraction; and (3) classifier development. In this paper, we detail the SLP paradigm and review several linguistic features that are especially amenable to uncovering the social dynamics of groups that are difficult to assess directly (i.e. through questionnaires, interviews or direct observation). We demonstrate the application of SLP to identify status, cohesion and deception in the case of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Specifically, we analyzed the memoranda, letters and public communiqués distributed within and from Saddam Hussein’s administration in a recently recovered corpus called the Iraqi Perspectives Project, along with several related projects. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges that SLP faces for assessing social features across cultures in public and captured communications of terrorists and political regimes, along with responses to these organizations.

Cross-Cultural Constructions of Self-Schemas Americans and Mexicans

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 and chronically activated dimensions of personality that influence individuals’ self-defining process. The results showed that there were seven relevant self-schemas for Americans and six dimensions for Mexicans. Using qualitative and quantitative analyses, it was possible to observe which self-schemas were cross-cultural and which were culture-specific: Self-schemas common across cultures were Sociability, Values, Hobbies/Daily Activities, and Emotionality. Self-schemas unique to Americans were Fun, Existentialism, and College Experience. Self-schemas unique to Mexicans were Relationships and Simpatía. We discuss cross-cultural differences in self-schemas, along with the advantages and limitations of using the MEM in cross-cultural research.

MEM's search for meaning: A rejoinder

concepts. The use of common particles, such as personal pronouns or prepositions, would further obscure the potential concepts because they do not add to the semantic resolution of the MEM. Among potential candidates, Fitzpatrick and Armstrong (2010) identified emotion words as useful language indicators for valencing the themes and making clinical inferences because emotion words have often been the focus of language studies in psychotherapy research (e.g., Anderson, Goldin, Kurita, & Gross, 2006; Frick et al., 2008; Mergenthaler, 1996). There are at least two possible ways of accounting for emotional valence: either by including emotion words in the MEM dictionary or by assessing them separately with emotion categories from stateof-the-art dictionaries, for example, Martindale’s (1975) Regressive Imagery Dictionary, the Ulm text bank dictionaries (e.g., Mergenthaler, 1996), the Gottschalk-Gleser Anxiety Scales (e.g., Gottschalk & Bechtel, 1995), and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007). If one thinks about using the MEM as a potentially useful tool for process outcome research, Fitzpatrick and Armstrong’s suggestions on how to ‘‘navigate the contextual waters’’ provide us with a road map for future research. Again, we can de-collapse the e-mails and introduce time and timing; that is, we can observe how the themes unfold during the intervention by modelling each e-mail’s component scores separately over time. One example of this process comes from a MEM analysis of statements made by al-Qaeda’s top leaders across two decades (Pennebaker & Chung, 2008). MEM themes were derived from a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation corpus of statements, interviews, and letters written or spoken by bin Ladin or al-Zawahiri (Pennebaker & Chung, 2008). A component score for each of the themes for each statement was computed, and it was then possible to track topics by the leaders over time. It will be interesting to explore whether similar longitudinal analyses can identify general patterns across participants in our sample and whether certain patterns are related to outcomes as well as interactions of both (e.g., in the simplest case, it might be hypothesized MEM’s search for meaning 95