Words of wisdom: Language use over the life span
Abstract
Two projects explored the links between language use and aging. In the first project, written or spoken text samples from disclosure studies from over 3,000 research participants from 45 different studies representing 21 laboratories in 3 countries were analyzed to determine how people change in their use of 14 text dimensions as a function of age. A separate project analyzed the collected works of 10 well-known novelists, playwrights, and poets who lived over the last 500 years. Both projects found that with increasing age, individuals use more positive and fewer negative affect words, use fewer self-references, use more future-tense and fewer past-tense verbs, and demonstrate a general pattern of increasing cognitive complexity. Implications for using language as a marker of personality among current and historical texts are discussed.
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Older individuals use more positive emotion and less negative emotion words, prefer fewer self-references, and stylistically there is less use of negation.
“For age, the most salient findings include older individuals using more positive emotion and less negative emotion words [30], older individuals preferring fewer self-references (i.e. ‘I’, ‘me’) [30], [31], and stylistically there is less use of negation [37].”
From Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach (2013) · cites this paper as [30]
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- Authors
- Pennebaker, J. W., & Stone, L. D.
- Affiliations
- The University of Texas at Austin (US)
- The Harris Poll (United States) (US)
- ORCID
- Pennebaker, James W.
- Venue
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Published
- 2003
- Volume
- 85
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 291-301
- ISSN
- 0022-3514 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-1315
- OpenAlex
- W1979230891
- Cited by
- 518
- References
- 79
- Citations by year
- 2026: 16 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 21 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 45 · 2021: 37 · 2020: 40 · 2019: 24 · 2018: 22 · 2017: 32 · 2016: 28 · 2015: 34 · 2014: 33 · 2013: 22 · 2012: 22
- FWCI
- 11.14
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH052391, MH52391)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Mental Health via Writing
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Authorship Attribution and Profiling
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology › Aging and Gerontology Research
- Keywords
- language use, aging, lifespan development, self-reference, tense, cognitive complexity, historical texts, literary works
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Adult, Aged, Aged, 80 and over, Aging, Child, Female, Humans, Language, Linguistics, Male, Middle Aged, Self Disclosure, Writing, Knowledge, Life
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