Through computerized text analysis, the psychology of literature is on the threshold of becoming a dominant force in psychology and the social sciences. The ways people use words in their writing and in everyday life reflect people’s social and psychological states. Whereas most text analysis research has focused on the content of people’s writings, the current paper demonstrates that almost-invisible function words can be psychologically relevant as well. Through the analysis of pronouns, prepositions, and other function words used in literature, several studies demonstrate how authors’ emotional states, aging processes, theories of mind, and the nature of their romantic and collaborative relationships are revealed through their words. The function word approach provides a glimpse of the rapidly expanding methods available to psychologists interested in tracking the social and psychological worlds of authors. With the upcoming release of data sets such as Google Books, the analysis of literature will likely serve as a foundational method used in the fields of psychology, linguistics, history, and other areas of the behavioral and social sciences.
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Djikic, Maja & Keith Oatley
2014. On the fragility of the artist: art’s precarious triad. In Creativity and Mental Illness, ► pp. 281 ff.
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2023. Uncovering the Social-Cognitive Contributors to Social Dysfunction in Borderline Personality Disorder Through Language Analysis. Journal of Personality Disorders 37:4 ► pp. 444 ff.
Junker, Christine R., Mark S. Cubberley & Stephen J. Jacquemin
2022. Swirling currents. Scientific Study of Literature 12:1-2 ► pp. 28 ff.
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2021. Sexual Dimorphism in Language, and the Gender Shift Hypothesis of Homosexuality. Frontiers in Psychology 12
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2019. Genre-typical narrative arcs in films are less appealing to lay audiences and professional film critics. Behavior Research Methods 51:4 ► pp. 1636 ff.
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2014. The Secret Life of Pronouns. What Our Words Say About Us. Literary and Linguistic Computing 29:1 ► pp. 139 ff.
2020. Collective Responses to Collective Traumas: Synchronization and Collective Resilience. In Societies Under Threat [Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research, 3], ► pp. 201 ff.
Szkody, Erica & Cliff McKinney
2022. Evaluating comforting messages with the sentiment analysis and social cognition engine. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being 14:2 ► pp. 645 ff.
2014. Epistolary voices. The case of Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken. Literary and Linguistic Computing 29:3 ► pp. 443 ff.
Yeh, Aiden & Pham Thi Minh Trang
2022. Avicii’s S.O.S.: A psychobiographical approach and corpus-based discourse analysis on suicidal ideation. Psychology of Language and Communication 26:1 ► pp. 207 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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