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ERIC Number: EJ758833
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2006
Pages: 32
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0163-853X
EISSN: N/A
Language with Character: A Stratified Corpus Comparison of Individual Differences in E-Mail Communication
Oberlander, Jon; Gill, Alastair J.
Discourse Processes: A Multidisciplinary Journal, v42 n3 p239-270 2006
To what extent does the wording and syntactic form of people's writing reflect their personalities? Using a bottom-up stratified corpus comparison, rather than the top-down content analysis techniques that have been used before, we examine a corpus of e-mail messages elicited from individuals of known personality, as measured by the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (S. Eysenck, Eysenck, & Barrett, 1985). This method allowed us to isolate linguistic features associated with different personality types, via both word and part-of-speech n-gram analysis. We investigated the extent to which extraversion is associated with linguistic features involving positivity, sociability, complexity, and implicitness and neuroticism is associated with negativity, self-concern, emphasis, and implicitness. Numerous interesting features were uncovered. For instance, higher levels of extraversion involved a preference for adjectives, whereas lower levels of neuroticism involved a preference for adverbs. However, neither positivity nor negativity was as prominent as expected, and there was little evidence for implicitness.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 10 Industrial Avenue, Mahwah, NJ 07430-2262. Tel: 800-926-6579; Tel: 201-258-2200; Fax: 201-236-0072; e-mail: journals@erlbaum.com; Web site: https://www.LEAonline.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A