If someone asked you what the weather was like, how would you answer?
It turns out whether you said "It's hot." or "I think it's hot." says quite a bit about what your social status is, how emotionally stable you are and even if you're more likely to commit suicide.
So says researcher James Pennebaker, who helped develop a computer program that counts and categorizes words in texts:
"After analyzing 400,000 texts -- including essays by college students, instant messages between lovers, chat room discussions, and press conference transcripts -- he concluded that function words are important keys to someone's psychological state and reveal much more than content words do. [For instance,] if someone uses the pronoun 'I,' it's a sign of self-focus... Depressed people use the word 'I' much more often than emotionally stable people. People who are lower in status use 'I' much more frequently."
More here.
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