Speaker 1:	Good afternoon. Thank you for coming, and welcome to Research + Pizza, a lunchtime lecture series featuring research presentations by faculty from across the university. I would at this point normally say, "Please help yourself to the drinks and pizza," but guess what? The pizza is not here yet. It will be here soon. In distinction from our previous Research + Pizzas where people got their food and drink, and then sat down and enjoyed the presentation, you will first enjoy the presentation, and then afterwards, you'll get your pizza and sodas, okay? I hope no one's too terribly hungry. It won't be very long. All right. Well, then with that out of the way, we will say that when you do get your pizza and sodas, we'd like you, please, to keep the food and drink inside this room. Please don't take it outside. We have spaces back by the door, by the back window, where you can recycle your cans. We would appreciate that as well.
	This is our third installment of Research + Pizza, and it features Dr. James Pennebaker, who is the Regents Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts and the department chair in psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his PhD in 1977. He's been on the faculty at the University of Virginia, SMU, and since 1997, the University of Texas. He and his students are exploring the links between traumatic experiences, expressive writing, natural language use, and physical and mental health. His studies find that physical health and work performance can improve by simple writing and/or talking exercises.
	His recent research focuses on the nature of language and emotion in the real world. The words people use serve as powerful reflections of their personality and social worlds. He's the author or editor of nine books and more than 250 articles, and has received numerous awards and honors. A couple of weeks ago, he was a guest at the Texas Book Festival discussing his most recent book, The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us. This book is available through the UT Libraries. You'll need to request it, because you can see that it's pretty popular. A couple of people already have it on recall.
Dr. Pennebaker: No, no, no, you don't need to do that. You should buy it. (audience laughs)
Speaker 1:	There you go. You should buy it, okay? Christmas is coming. You should buy the book. He's here to talk to us about this today and about our words, and then afterwards, we'll probably all be talking with fewer pronouns, maybe, depending on what we find out. Please welcome James Pennebaker. (applause)
Dr. Pennebaker: Thank you. What I'm planning to do today is to kind of give you an overview of some of the work that I've been doing over the last few years dealing with not so much pronouns. In fact, if I knew today what I knew ... Or if 30 years ago, someone said, "Oh, in 30 years from now, you're going to be giving a talk on pronouns, because that's what your research is," I would have got out of the business. I'd be selling insurance. I don't care about parts of speech. I've never understood parts of speech. I'm really a psychologist, and I'm interested in people's personality, what makes people do what they do. I'm interested in how people connect with one another. I'm interested in how people deal with emotional upheavals in their lives.
	The thought of becoming an expert on pronouns, articles, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs is on one level a little bit repugnant, except it turns out that these words, which don't sound very important, are actually really important. They're also really interesting, and they tell us a tremendous amount about people. What I want to do is give you kind of a very quick background in terms of how in the world I ended up becoming interested in pronouns, prepositions, articles, and so forth, and then give you a very quick view on why they are so interesting.
	Okay, early in my career, I did a lot of research on how people cope with traumatic experience. I discovered, if we have people write about traumatic experience, it has this really positive effect on people's physical health. After discovering that, I started looking at what people would write. I became curious. Can you look at someone's writing sample if they've written about a traumatic experience and predict if their health would improve or not improve just by the way they wrote? Now, to do that meant that I had to have a bunch of experts read all of these traumatic stories people had written.
	What I quickly learned was it was really slow, it was very expensive, and judges didn't agree on features of writing. To make it even more complex, getting my judges to read horrible trauma after horrible trauma tended to depress all of my judges. Well, that's not a very efficient way to do research so I thought, "Well, I'll just get my computer program to analyze it." Then I started looking around, and at the time, there were no computer programs. I figured, how hard could it be to write one?
	It turns out it was kind of hard, but with the help of one of my graduate students, Martha Francis, she and I developed a computer program that we called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, LIWC, which we pronounce Luke. Over the years, what this computer program did and still does is it would go in and look at any given text, and look at the percentage of words in any text that were parts of different dimensions. For example, positive emotion words, love, happy, care, or anger words, hate, kill, nasty, sadness words, et cetera, or we also had it look for certain types of thinking words or cognitive words, words like causal words, words like because, cause, effect, reason, rationale.
	In doing this, we needed to have a group of judges all agree what words made up what categories. Now, for a lot of these, it took a huge amount of work, but then as long as you're doing this, because once you write the program, you just need lists of words for the computer to look for, we thought, well, we'd just do some kind of standard grammatical things. We had pronouns, personal pronouns, impersonal pronouns, first person, second person, third person, and so forth, and articles, conjunctions, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and so forth.
	Okay, so now we had this computer program that could go in and analyze not just one file, but it could analyze any text file. We started downloading stuff from the internet. We downloaded hundreds and thousands of books, of poems, of lyrics. We had data from or text from people writing about traumatic experiences. We had started downloading first hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of blogs, basically anything, speeches, whatever, and started to look at, what can we discover about the way people use words?
	Well, we discovered early on in terms of our early ... all these essays that people had written about in terms of traumatic experience, we actually could predict whose health would improve by just looking at the language of the way they wrote. For example, if they used a high rate of positive emotion words, they're more likely to benefit from their writing than if they didn't use a high rate of positive emotion words. If they constructed a story over the three or four days of writing, that is, they increased in their use of certain groups of cognitive words, like causal words, words like because, cause, and effect, going from a low rate of those to a high rate over the three or four days of writing, the more their health improved.
	But there were some other things that I started noticing that didn't make a bit of sense. For example, we got huge differences between men and women, big differences between young students and old students. We got all these differences that none of them made any sense. For example, with sex differences, some of you have probably heard ... How many of you have heard me speak before? Okay, so you can't vote. Okay, so how do men and women differ in the way they use language? This could be blogs. It could be natural conversations. It could be formal talks. It could be anything.
	Who uses the word I more, men or women? How many think men use the word I more? Raise your hand. How many think women use it more? Okay. We, us, and our, how many think men use we more? How many think women do? Okay. How many emotion words? How many think men use emotion words more? Women? Okay. Cognitive words, these are words like because, cause, effect, reason, rationale. How many think men use cognitive words more? How many think women do? Okay. Articles, a, an, and the. How many think men use articles more? How many think women do? Okay. You guys are just as pathetic as every other group that I deal with. Actually, you were a little bit better, but don't pat yourself on the back. We had some split votes. Usually, people will vote in the wrong direction more unanimously.
	Okay, here's the answer key. Who uses I more? Women do. Women not just in the United States, not just English speakers, but across all cultures, women use the word I at much higher rates than men. Why is that? Well, because the word I is a marker of where you're paying attention. Pronouns tell us where people are paying attention. Use of I is a marker of paying attention to self, being associated with self-reflection. You were thinking, which I did before I started this research, that the use of I is a marker of arrogance, pomposity, just being an asshole, in other words, like a man. In fact, men might be arrogant, but they don't use I more. Women use I more.
	We, us, and our, a trick question. There's no difference. Men and women use we at about the same rates, but there are two different types of we's. There's the we, you and I together, we just hold hands and we love one another, which is not used that much. More often, we is used in this way of the way I talk to my son or I used to talk to my son. Well, Nick, we need to take out the trash. It really isn't you and I need to hold hands and take the trash out together. It's really you need to take out the trash. Or I'm with my graduate students. We need to analyze that data. No, it really isn't me. It's really you guys need to analyze that data. Okay, and there is some sex differences. Women tend to use the warm and fuzzy we more. Men use the cold distance we more.
	Emotion words, no difference. Cognitive words, because, cause, and effect, women consistently use those more than men do, which on the surface doesn't make any sense, but it will in just a second. Articles, a, an, and the, you had no idea, but you guessed wrong. Men use articles at much higher rates. Why is this? Because it depends on what people are talking about. I forgot to ask you who uses social words more, references to he, she, they, friend, et cetera. You would have guessed correctly that women use those words more. In an analysis of tens of thousands of conversations, what we find is that women are much more likely to talk about other people. Women are interested in other human beings. Men are interested in objects and things. If you're talking about objects and things, you need articles, because articles precede concrete nouns, the table, a chair, et cetera. Women are talking about he, she, they.
	Now, it also turns out that if you're talking about other human beings, you're dealing with more cognitively complex topics. If you're trying to distinguish why Jennifer Lopez dumped her last husband for whoever she's with right now, to analyze that requires tremendous cognitive abilities. Well, it's because of him. It's because of her. She did this and da da da da da, versus the guys saying carburetor, carburetor, why doesn't it work, carburetor. In other words, the cognitive, you don't need as rich cognitive language to describe a carburetor as you do a relationship.
	Now, it was through these kinds of analyses I started to appreciate that men and women were differing on these words that nobody pays attention to. These group of words are called function words. They include about eight or nine different categories of words. They include pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, negations, quantifiers, and a couple of others. Now, what's interesting about these words is there's only about fewer than 500 in English, of which only about 180 are common. Out of a vocabulary, the average person in this room has a vocabulary of somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 words, and only 500 of them are these function words.
	These function words are also processed in the brain differently. Here's your brain. For most of you, your language centers are on the left side. In the frontal lobe right here is an area called Broca's area, and an area right here is called Wernicke's area, right above it in the temporal lobe. If there's damage to these areas, you get very, very different speech deficits. What's interesting is that if there's damage to the frontal lobe, the person can describe things in a really painfully slow way, paper, desk, white paper, but that's about it.
	But if there's damage to Wernicke's area, and Broca's area is doing very well, and you ask a person to describe what's on the desk, they'll say, "Oh, yeah, sure. This is right here. You see this one is right next to that one. It's over here, and I'm right here." In other words, they can talk very fluidly, but they don't say anything. In one case, in Broca's area, their language is made up almost exclusively of function words. If Broca's area is damaged and the temporal lobe, Wernicke's area, is working, they use nouns and regular verbs, but have tremendous problems socially connecting with others, which makes sense because the frontal lobe is linked to social relationships or social connections.
	Now, what's interesting about all this is, as we start looking at it, these function words are in fact social. Imagine you're walking down the street. The wind is starting to blow right now because here we have another front coming in, and a piece of paper is coming along the ground and hits on your leg. You pick it up, and it says, "I will meet you later. See you soon." Now, grammatically, it's okay, but in a sense, that note makes no sense, because that note is made up almost entirely of function words. I will meet you later. I, who's I? Will, which implies future. When was this written? What does that refer to? Meet you, who's you? Later, when's later?
	All of those words are words that are shared between the speaker and the listener at a particular time in a particular location. Outside of that context, those words have no meaning. In other words, it requires social skills to use function words, to use them and also to understand them. What it also means is that, if we start analyzing function words, we can get a sense of people's social worlds. We can get a sense of people's relationship with the people they're talking to and also the relationship between what they're talking about.
	This is where that computer program I designed started to make tremendous sense. We can now go into any kind of text and start to get a sense of people's personalities. Just as I was saying men and women differ along these different dimensions, by looking at these dimensions, we get a sense of how people are thinking. If someone is using high rates of pronouns, especially second and third-person pronouns, by definition those people are interested in other human beings. If a person is not using pronouns, they don't care about other human beings, certainly not in that particular text. If people are using high rates of articles, whether they're a male or female, they are talking about concrete things. If people are using first-person singular, I, me, and my, by definition they are paying attention to themselves.
	Now we can start asking questions. Well, what kind of person pays attention to themselves? Well, it turns out the word I is one of the richest in terms of the kind of work that I do. For example, people who use I at high rates are more depressed than people who don't. If you have a group of students write about why they're in college, the people who use the word I the most are the ones who are most depressed, most anxious, most self-reflective. The people who use I the least by and large aren't. They're out. They're paying attention to the world. They're not paying attention to themselves. We've analyzed the poetry of poets, suicidal poets versus non-suicidal poets. You would think that the suicidal poets would use more words related to sadness and negative emotion, but that's not true. All poets are depressed, so that's in the job description. The way you can tell a suicidal versus non-suicidal poet is their poetry is ... They use more I. They are much more self-focused than the non-suicidal poets.
	We also can look at language as a lie detector. We've done studies where we have people steal minor things, and then we interrogate them, or we have them write essays that they truly believe versus they don't truly believe. We simply look at their use of language. One of the best predictors of telling the truth is the use of I. A person who's telling the truth uses I at much higher rates than someone who's lying. Start paying attention to politicians. You will find that by and large, the politician who use I the least tends to be the least, in all probability, the least honest and the least ... They're much less personal. They're much more psychologically distant. They're probably not as in touch with themselves as well.
	We've looked at language in a zillion other dimensions as well. Actually, we do a lot of analysis of politicians, and I can answer questions about that in a few minutes, but I will not answer questions about our esteemed governor, simply because I haven't done that yet. We also have looked at human relationships. What can you tell about a group of people from a distance? In other words, let's say I want to study a group over there, and I have a transcript of their language. Can I tell who's the high status versus the low status person? Yes, and actually I do a really good job at it. The higher the status a person is in a group, the less they use the word I.
	Go and look at your emails, and you will be horrified to see this. When you're writing to someone who's higher status than you, you use I at high rates. When you're writing to someone who's lower status, you don't use I, or you use it at much lower rates. For example, if some of you are undergraduates and you sent me an email, your email might be something like this. "Dear Dr. Pennebaker, I am so-and-so, and I am doing this, and I am doing this. I would like this, and I was wondering if I could do this." I write back, "Dear Student, thank you so much for your email. Unfortunately, the university, da da da da da." Then I look at my own emails to the dean. "Dear Dean, I am Jamie Pennebaker, and I need this, and I would like this, and I'd like this." The dean writes back, "Dear Jamie, thank you so much for your email. Unfortunately, the university ..." Nobody's being rude. Nobody's being inappropriate. We just do it automatically.
	We also can get a sense of how close any two people are connecting with one another. The way that we do this is a method that's called language style matching, or LSM, we call it. Language style matching is a method where we look at the degree to which any two people in an interaction are using function words at comparable levels. For example, if we have two people in a conversation, we look at the percentage of words that each person is using, personal pronouns, impersonal pronouns, articles, interjections, and so forth. The more similar they are, the higher their style matching, so it's a real simple mathematical equation.
	We've been doing some glorious studies on this in the last couple of years. For example, we've looked at people in speed dates. Some of you have probably been involved in speed dating. The heterosexual speed dating system would be one where you have maybe 10 females, 10 males, depends on how it's run, but you could have all the 10 guys coming in. They all sit at a different table, and then all the women come in. They come and they sit down, one with each male. That couple talks to each other for four minutes. They make ratings, and then the females move to the next table, and so forth and so forth. Everybody talks to everybody else.
	We were involved in a project where we had a tape recorder at the table, so everybody knew that they were being recorded. We transcribed it. We calculated style matching, and we were able to predict who would end up going on a date at rates better than the people themselves, simply because very often, one person will say, "Well, yeah, that was a great date. I'd really like to go out with that person." The other person would say, "Wow, what a loser. I don't want to have anything to do with that person." But our style matching numbers could catch it.
	We've looked at young dating couples among first-year college students. We had 86 couples. First-year college student relationships, I hate to tell some of you, bad news, they're real unstable. From my perspective, that's fabulous, because it gives me good data. What we did was we got these 86 couples to give us their instant messages back and forth to each other for 10 days. We had them fill out questionnaires. How good is your relationship? How likely will you be together and so forth? We can predict who will be together in three months at much, much better rates than the couple themselves can. Again, how do we do it? With our style matching numbers.
	Now, what I simply want to do is just ... My goal today is just to give you a sense that there is so much information that is contained in the way we all use function words. By the way, because we're going to move to questions in just a second, the other reason I love the analysis of function words is you can't hear them. Now, you've probably noticed as I've been talking, you might have noticed, "Oh, yeah, he just used the word I. He just used a or whatever." But you can't keep your mind on that for more than a few seconds.
	One reason is function words are the shortest words in virtually all languages. They go inside your brain at what's called priming speed. You can barely pay attention to them, and you just can't attend to them. If you start paying attention to them very seriously, you can't hear the content of speech. Now what this means is, if you ask a question, I will not be analyzing your words because I can't. If you want me to, write down your words, and I can analyze them with my computer, or you can go to ... Let me give you a website. It's called www.secretlifeofpronouns.com. There's a button at the top that's just called ?exercises.?
	There are various places you can go to, and you can enter language, and you can analyze your own words, or you can use our language style matching. You can calculate language style matching between you and the person you're dating or whatever. The point is is don't feel self-conscious around me, because I ... I should tell you, I get so many people who will send me an email. "Dear Dr. Pennebaker, I was wondering if you could come and do this, da da da da da. P.S. I spent an hour writing this email." Okay, so rather than continue giving you other interesting examples, let me just stop here and open this up for questions.
Speaker 3:	Knowing these things, how can we improve our own communication? If I want to write you, should I say, "You are awesome. You are great," and just try not to use I? How can we use this to communicate better with both people of a higher status if we want to be higher status or in relationships?
Dr. Pennebaker: Well, first of all, this is really difficult. You can do it certainly with written language. You can engineer it some. I guess one way to think about this is, how do you want to come across? Do you want to come across as earnest and honest? I would use more I. If you want to come across as arrogant and pompous, use lots of articles. Don't use any pronouns. Use big words. I think for this, you can engineer how you write an application for a job, and also keep in mind, you want to match who you are sending this letter to.
	If you're an engineer and you're applying for a job, and the people who are going to be evaluating you are also engineers, in all likelihood, they're not the most socially skilled people in the world. I don't mean that in a negative way, but they don't use personal pronouns as much. We have good data on that. They are more interested in the topics that they're focusing on, and that's probably what they're interested in. If you're in communication, you're dealing with very socially skilled people, or people who their social worlds are much bigger. You would probably write in a more informal kind of way.
	Where this is more interesting for me is how politicians ... how speeches are written for politicians. My very favorite story ... I hate people who answer questions that go on forever, but this is such a good story. In 2004, Kerry was running against Bush. You'll remember John Kerry, stiff, cold, distant. He just didn't connect with people. I was reading the New York Times, and I came across an article saying Kerry's advisors were telling him he needed to start using the word we more, because he was coming across as cold. I read that and thought, "This guy's dead."
	The reason? Because he was already using we at twice the rate of Bush, and we is a mark ... When a politician uses we at high rates, they are cold, distant, and so forth. His advisors were now telling him, "Hey, you're not coming across as cold enough. Get really chilly and increase your we a lot." Part of this is just ... By the way, language and non-verbal behavior and what you're saying are all part of the package deal. I don't think by changing your language, it's going to change your personality. Changing your personality though will change your language, and you can use language as a marker of who you are and how you're coming across. Yes.
Speaker 1:	Can I just jump ... Sorry. Can I just jump in here for a minute and say that this is going to be recorded as a podcast, so I'll try to get to you and get your question with the microphone?
Dr. Pennebaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker 4:	When you were writing your book, did you think about these elements of language as you were constructing it? If not, have you gone back and analyzed the text that you produced and seeing what came out of it?
Dr. Pennebaker: I have. I analyze my language a lot, but when I was writing the book, I didn't think about it at all. To me, when I write, my goal is to come across as me. It's kind of like this talk. I have not thought about it in terms of the language I used, but I'd be curious to see what my language would be. There are some evolutions in a book, and I compared my language in this book versus my last popular book. But I've analyzed everything. I've analyzed all the letters of recommendation I've written for hundreds of students over the years. I've analyzed my conversations with my family. It drives them nuts, I should say. I find that it's very interesting just to get a sense of how I use words. Sometimes it informs me that I'm being a little bit cold to this person, or something weird's going on with this relationship. [inaudible 00:30:25].
Speaker 5:	I was reading an article, and I noticed that you were quoted for this study that you did where you analyzed a Twitter message between Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. When using a medium like Twitter where you're limited to the amount of characters that you can use, and so the amount of words and phrases you can put together, can your study still work? What is the length that you need to be able to properly analyze?
Dr. Pennebaker: Okay. I did not analyze Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, but I have analyzed various other people. In fact, here's another website if you're interested in Twitter, analyzewords.com, which is just a place where you go. You put in someone's Twitter address, and it'll analyze all of the ... I think up to the last 100 Twitters, the tweets. I'm not sure. I'm never sure why there's as many as there are. What it does is it just goes through. We have previous data. If someone uses I words at high rates or these emotion words at high rates, or they have lots of connections to other people, social words, we're able to break down kind of features of their personality. The rule is the more words we have on people, the better. If it was just one tweet, that's a really unstable measure, but once we get dozens or hundreds of tweets, then we start to get a much better picture of who that person might be.
Speaker 6:	What I wondered about is when you look at a couple or potential couple to see about if they're a good match or the stability of their relationship, are you looking to see if their language is similar, or if they are, I guess, symbiotic, if one is ... Well, I'll just leave it at that.
Dr. Pennebaker: Well, what we're going at is the degree to which they're using function words the same, which tells us that they're kind of on the same page in the way they're talking. Usually, it means they're talking on the same topic. It's very interesting looking at the relationships that are very low in their style matching. It's almost as though there are two conversations going on, or one person is being revealing and the other person doesn't want to hear it. You do get this sense of the low style matching, they're just not paying attention to each other.
	I should point out, style matching goes along with people who are passionate about one another and who absolutely hate one another. Listen to a good fight. A good fight, god, there's nothing more glorious. Writing this book, writing a book nowadays, is just so different than it was even 10 years ago. For example, I was looking for fights on the internet. I came on one on the TV program, The View. There was, was it, Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Rosie O'Donnell. They had this fight that was so fabulous. You read it, and you see that they are exactly on the same page. Their style matching is like lovers. They repeat what the other person says, and it's just over and over again. This is what happens in a good fight is that people are on the same page. Style matching is a marker of engagement, paying attention to the other person, not necessarily liking the other person.
Speaker 7:	Giving us this talk. I'm wondering if given the social skills requirement of function words, have they been used in any therapeutic procedures for kids with autism?
Dr. Pennebaker: That's a wonderful question. In fact, one of my students is interested in that. I'm actually talking to one of our faculty members in psychology, Rebecca Neal, who's interested in this. The answer as of now is no, but that's the natural thing to look at. I would predict that their use of function words would be ... There'd be a severe detriment in that.
Speaker 8:	I and we pronouns vary across cultures?
Dr. Pennebaker: I and we pronouns are wonderful across cultures, because many cultures have a pronoun drop, so Spanish, for example, is pronoun drop. Nevertheless, if you look at them in translation, the numbers come out just the same as in English, and the patterns are always the same. In Spanish, for example, I love it because what happens is in Spanish, keep in mind that use of I in Spanish, the separate word ?yo,? is often ... When you use it, you are really emphasizing I believe as opposed to he's doing this, but I'm doing this. When people are depressed in Spanish, they use ... In non-depressed blogs, for example, the use of the word yo, or I, is very, very low, even though they still might use first-person singular in the verbs at a decent rate. But in depression blogs, their use of the word yo is very, very high. In some ways, it's almost more diagnostic than it is in English.
	I should also mention some people often ask, what about languages that don't have articles? How can we say anything about that? For example, Japanese doesn't have articles. The reality is the Japanese can tell the difference between a table and the table. For a table, it's just called table. If it's the table, it's called that table or this table, so a specific table, but they still are making that distinction.
Speaker 9:	Have you found in written conversation between two people via text, chat, email that the sheer number of words on one side relative to the other says anything about their relationship, be it professional or personal?
Dr. Pennebaker: Yeah, we have. It's hard to know if it's a statistical weirdness or if it reflects truth. By and large, the more uneven the length of conversation between two people, the lower their style matching. It also predicts that their relationship's less likely to go someplace. It's a very interesting issue. Is the problem style matching, or is it differential word count? But I think they're all kind of the same issue. Where are those pizzas? How long do we have to keep talking?
Speaker 10:	I was wondering, if for a person who is learning a new language, does their language ... Is it affected by the person who's teaching them? How do they develop their language for a new language?
Dr. Pennebaker: Wow, that's a wonderful question. I am very interested in learning a second language. First of all, think about how ... My guess is most of you have learned a second language, some more successfully than others. I speak really bad Spanish, which means most of my training really was vocabulary. Most of that vocabulary really was nouns and verbs. If I'm in a conversation in Spanish, I'm sitting there trying to listen to the nouns and verbs, because I need to know what the conversation is about. All these words like pronouns and articles and prepositions, that's just gingerbread. I need to know what the conversation's about. You can tell someone who is learning English, they screw up not on nouns or regular verbs. They screw up on these function words, and the same thing when I'm speaking Spanish.
	Does my use of function words vary by who taught me? Maybe a little bit, but mostly it's a reflection of who I am. We've done a lot of studies of people in terms of analyzing their language in one language versus another. They tend to use language somewhat similarly. There are some differences but part of it is is that ... One of my favorite quotes is, "Learn a new language, get a new soul." I think that's true. Those of you who are bilingual, most of you would agree with this, that when you're speaking that second language, you are a somewhat different person.
	One of my graduate students, former graduate students, Nairan Ramirez, did a series of studies on bilinguals and found that when they are in one language, they have a different personality than when they're in another language, that it's subtly different. Part of it is the culture that the language comes from, but also part of it is themselves. Nevertheless, a person who's really extroverted in English tends to be extroverted in Spanish, but maybe not quite as much. It's still the same person, but the languages and the cultures with which they come shape them. Oh, okay.
Speaker 11:	Hi there. Can you hear me?
Dr. Pennebaker: Yes.
Speaker 11:	I have a question in regards to some of the, I guess, perceived friction based on your findings versus cultural conceptions of how language would be used. I reference Kerry's advisors saying, "Use we, use we, use we." The people on speed dating who are saying, "Oh, I thought that went great," when then you're saying it's not. Then when you polled us at the beginning, you asked us, "What do you think about the use of I," being sort of the asshole male, when in fact it was females using it more. It seems like in all of these cases, there are contradictions. Can you address that a little bit?
Dr. Pennebaker: Well, keep in mind, I'm a psychologist. What's interesting for a psychologist is to study things that go against common sense. This is one thing that has just drawn me to this like honey, simply because our stereotypes about how language works don't match how language works. It's true across languages. I do the same men-women thing around the world. Everybody has the same stereotypes. It's kind of like, who talks more on a daily basis, men or women? Everybody in all cultures say women do, but statistically they use actually the same number of words per day, at least in English and Spanish.
	The friction is from the stereotypes as opposed to the empirical data. There's not a group of researchers out there who say, "We've been doing the same analyses, and we get completely different results." Everybody gets the same results. The interesting thing is the stereotypes, and where do these stereotypes come from? I don't really know. I think part of it is just the word, for example, I. I implies being full of yourself. When I say, "I reflects being self-attentive," everybody goes, "Yeah, well, yeah, that's obvious." No one would say an arrogant person is self-reflective, but they would agree that self-reflection would go along with I. We're kind of told these kind of inconsistent stereotypes in our mind. Where they come from, I don't know.
Speaker 12:	Hi. As you were speaking about in the very beginning with differences between men and women with regard to attending to other human beings and relationships versus objects, and you noted that women are more likely to attend to other human beings, does that attention extend to the speech of those other human beings? Do you find that women are more effective style matchers than men are?
Dr. Pennebaker: Good question. We have some evidence that they actually are a little bit better. Some of the people in here have taken introductory psychology from me, I suspect. If you've took it in the past, you will not be doing this exercise this year, but we did this project which is ... I love it. We had students read a bunch of stuff from the textbook. We told them, "Okay, there's going to be questions about this for our next class." We went in, and you go online. There is, say, four questions about the reading.
	The questions are written in really different styles. One of them would be, "The theory of cognitive dissonance has a long and hallowed tradition within the scientific community." It's written in this pompous, arrogant style. Then another person will get, "Like wow, cognitive dissonance is the coolest theory ever!!! Like wow," and so it's valley girl. Then we asked, then at the end, we'd say, "Come up with an example of cognitive dissonance in your everyday life." What you find is is that people naturally match the language style of the written thing. We found that women tended to match more than men did. Also, people who did better in the class tended to match more than people who didn't, because they were probably paying closer attention.
Speaker 1:	Guess what's here?
Dr. Pennebaker: Phew.
Speaker 1:	Thank you very much.
Dr. Pennebaker: Thank you.
Speaker 1:	This was fabulous (applause). Some of you have the little half-sheets that are the feedback forms. We'd love for you to fill them out. Just leave them on any of these sort of wooden rails, see here, or on that side when you fill it out, you can just leave it there and we'll collect it. The food is up. The drinks are up. It is cold and flu season. Use the hand sanitizer, and thanks for coming.
RPP-Pennebaker 

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