Pennebaker Use Of Language Summary

Pennebaker explores how people’s use of language reveals parts of their personality, thinking style emotional state and connections with others. Some of the most revealing words that we use are the shortest and most forgettable; pronouns (I, you, we), articles (a, an, the), prepositions (to, for, over) and other function words reveal the kind of people we are. Pennebaker began as a social psychologist who focused on health, emotions and the nature of traumatic experiences. He experimented with patients writing about traumatic experiences and found surprising results.
Pennebaker conducted an experiment where patients would write about traumatic events fifteen to twenty minutes for three or four consecutive days. When these patients were compared to patients who did not write about traumatic experiences, it was found that the patients who wrote about traumatic experiences felt improved physical health. Research revealed that emotional writing could boost immune function, brought about by changes in blood pressure, feeling, and mood. While the effects may be small, the act of converting emotion into words has been
The general assumption was that angry people would use more angry-related words and sad people would use more sad words and so on. It was found that the more people used positive emotions while trying to write about traumatic events, the more their physical and mental health improved after the experiment. People who used negative words at very high rates or very low rates did not benefit. The more people changed in their use of first-person pronouns (I. me, my) and other pronouns (we, you, she, they) the better their health later became. Healthy writing involves positive emotion words, a moderate use of negative words, and changes in pronoun