Nicholas S. Holtzman

Narcissism and the Use of Personal Pronouns Revisited

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 109(3) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see record 2015-37773-002). The authors erroneously reported the overall correlation, first stated in the abstract, between Narcissism and total first-person-singular use as .02 (.017) instead of .01 (.010). The misreporting of the overall correlation between Narcissism and total use of first-person singular does not change the results or interpretation in any way (i.e., the near-zero association between Narcissism and I-talk). The online version of this article has been corrected.] Among both laypersons and researchers, extensive use of first-person singular pronouns (i.e., I-talk) is considered a face-valid linguistic marker of narcissism. However, the assumed relation between narcissism and I-talk has yet to be subjected to a strong empirical test. Accordingly, we conducted a large-scale (N = 4,811), multisite (5 labs), multimeasure (5 narcissism measures) and dual-language (English and German) investigation to quantify how strongly narcissism is related to using more first-person singular pronouns across different theoretically relevant communication contexts (identity-related, personal, impersonal, private, public, and stream-of-consciousness tasks). Overall (r = .02, 95% CI [-.02, .04]) and within the sampled contexts, narcissism was unrelated to use of first-person singular pronouns (total, subjective, objective, and possessive). This consistent near-zero effect has important implications for making inferences about narcissism from pronoun use and prompts questions about why I-talk tends to be strongly perceived as an indicator of narcissism in the absence of an underlying actual association between the 2 variables. (PsycINFO Database Record

Above and beyond short-term mating, long-term mating is uniquely tied to human personality.

To what extent are personality traits and sexual strategies linked? The literature does not provide a clear answer, as it is based on the Sociosexuality model, a one-dimensional model that fails to measure long-term mating (LTM). An improved two-dimensional model separately assesses long-term and short-term mating (STM; Jackson and Kirkpatrick, 2007). In this paper, we link this two-dimensional model to an array of personality traits (Big 5, Dark Triad, and Schizoid Personality). We collected data from different sources (targets and peers; Study 1), and from different nations (United States, Study 1; India, Study 2). We demonstrate for the first time that, above and beyond STM, LTM captures variation in personality.

Fast and Slow Sexual Strategies Are Not Opposites: Implications for Personality and Psychopathology

In the target article, Del Giudice (this issue) uses life history theory (LHT) to help explain personality and psychopathology. Although we admit the explanatory power of LHT is enticing, especially to minimalists, and although we have employed LHT previously in theorizing about the evolution of individual differences (Holtzman, Augustine, & Senne, 2011; Holtzman & Strube, 2011), here we offer a skeptical message about LHT in the spirit of scientific progress. A central assumption of LHT is that short-term mating (the mating strategy preferred by fast life history strategists) is the polar opposite of long-term mating (the mating strategy preferred by slow life history strategists). This means that short-term mating activities, such as having one-night stands, and longterm mating activities, such as getting married and raising children, are assumed to be directly pitted against one another. On the surface, the notion that there is an opposition between these two sexual strategies makes some sense, because time and energy spent engaging in one strategy is time and energy that cannot be spent engaging in the other strategy; however, recent empirical evidence suggests that this opposition may not be as strict as is implied by LHT. For instance, in a groundbreaking study, Jackson and Kirkpatrick (2007) explored the potential of a multidimensional approach to investigating sexual strategies by developing a measure that contained items aimed at assessing both orientation toward short-term mating and orientation toward long-term mating. They reasoned that if short-term and longterm mating are in fact relatively separate dimensions, then they should be only moderately inversely correlated. In contrast, if short-term and long-term mating are polar opposites on a single dimension, then they should be very strongly inversely correlated. In accordance with their prediction, Jackson and Kirkpatrick (2007) found that the short-term mating orientation and long-term mating orientation scales were only modestly negatively correlated. Thus, the authors concluded that short-term and longterm mating orientation are not opposites on the same dimension but instead should be measured on relatively separate dimensions. Figure 1 depicts this two-dimensional (2D) model of sexual strategies. In this model, the short-term mating axis extends from the bottom right (low shortterm mating orientation) to the top left (high shortterm mating orientation), and the long-term mating axis extends from the bottom left (low long-term mating orientation) to the top right (high long-term mating orientation). Whereas traditional orthogonal axes would indicate that short-term and long-term mating orientation are entirely independent of one another (r D .00), and a single axis would indicate that shortterm and long-term mating orientation are direct opposites of one another (r D –1.00), here the axes are intentionally situated between these two extremes, thus reflecting the moderate negative correlation between short-term and long-term mating orientation (Holtzman & Strube, 2013; Jackson & Kirkpatrick, 2007). This 2D model has an important explanatory advantage over the 1D LHT model. Because LHT pits short-term strategies directly against long-term strategies, LHT can capture only those individuals who use either short-term or long-term sexual strategies exclusively. In contrast, the 2D model of sexual strategies can describe four different varieties of people: those who use short-term strategies only, those who use long-term strategies only, those who use a combination of short-term and long-term strategies, and those who use neither short-term nor long-term sexual strategies. These four varieties constitute the quadrants of Figure 1. Clearly, there are instances in which a person might use more than one type of sexual strategy or might not use any sexual strategy. Take, for example, an extraverted and open-minded man who, though he has had several children with his wife and engages in parenting activities with her, has a few one-night stands with extramarital partners on the side. Admittedly, there is somewhat of a trade-off between these two activities; it is obvious that a person cannot be in two different geographical locations (a long-term mating context and a short-term mating context) at once. However, this does not imply that a few short-term sexual encounters preclude the man in the example

Exploring Political Ideologies of Senators With Semantic Analysis Tools: Further Validation of CASS

Phrase counting is an effective approach to capturing individual differences in language use. Specific phrases (e.g., “war on terrorism”) powerfully predict a congressperson’s political ideology. The question addressed in this study is whether there is additional information that can be extracted from the indirect relations among words in large Senatorial speech databases. Given that direct co-occurrence of target words is a very low likelihood event, we focus on higher-order co-occurrence (e.g., whether two target words appear in similar semantic contexts), using the free software Contrast Analysis of Semantic Similarity (CASS) to compute individual differences (www.casstools.org). We describe how we used CASS in detail and provide a tutorial. Using text transcripts from 86 Senators, totaling over 150 million words, we demonstrate that CASS can account for political ideology above and beyond phrase counts. By complementing phrase count methods, CASS may be a useful method for the digital humanities and social sciences more generally.

Depression, negative emotionality, and self-referential language: A multi-lab, multi-measure, and multi-language-task research synthesis.

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 labs across 2 countries, we examined, in a preregistered analysis, how the depression–I-talk effect varied by (a) first-person singular pronoun type (i.e., subjective, objective, and possessive), (b) the communication context in which language was generated (i.e., personal, momentary thought, identity-related, and impersonal), and (c) gender. Overall, there was a small but reliable positive correlation between depression and I-talk (r = .10, 95% CI [.07, .13]). The effect was present for all first-person singular pronouns except the possessive type, in all communication contexts except the impersonal one, and for both females and males with little evidence of gender differences. Importantly, a similar pattern of results emerged for negative emotionality. Further, the depression–I-talk effect was substantially reduced when controlled for negative emotionality but this was not the case when the negative emotionality–I-talk effect was controlled for depression. These results suggest that the robust empirical link between depression and I-talk largely reflects a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk. Self-referential language using first-person singular pronouns may therefore be better construed as a linguistic marker of general distress proneness or negative emotionality rather than as a specific marker of depression.

Mind Perception and Individual Differences: A Replication and Extension

ABSTRACT Mind perception involves attributing higher functional abilities to others (e.g., saying a dog feels pain). The relationships between mind perception and psychopathology—autism, psychopathy, and schizotypy—have been revealed by K. Gray, Jenkins, Heberlein, and Wegner (2011); however, mind perception has yet to be correlated with personality. Participants (N = 180) completed measures of personality, psychopathology, and mind perception. The psychopathology results were consistent with Gray et al. (2011). The Big Five captured mind perception virtually as much as the three psychopathologies captured mind perception. Mind perception is not solely relevant to psychopathology; it is also relevant to everyday personality.