Linguistic Bases of Social Perception
Abstract
Target persons were videotaped while engaged in an interview. A text analysis program was used to ascertain the frequency with which they employed negative emotion words, positive emotion words, words reflecting cognitive operations, self-referents, presenttense verbs, negations, and unique words in their verbalizations. Judges viewed the videotapes and evaluated the target persons on a number of social perception dimensions. The language dimensions accounted for significant and substantial proportions of the variance in impressions of the target persons beyond that explained by traditionally studied person perception variables such as physical attractiveness, nonverbal expressiveness, and facial maturity. The results indicate the critical role that language plays in social perception and interaction.
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1.
1. We have some direct empirical evidence that such occasional misclassifications do not invalidate the LIWC category counts to any great extent. For one set of transcripts, we coded the number of instances in which either a positive emotion word was preceded by a negation (e.g., "I am not hap") or a negative emotion word was preceded by a negation (e.g., "She's not angry"). For each individual transcript, we then calculated the total instances of negative emotion words counted by LIWC and subtracted from it the number of instances of negated emotion words. A similar procedure was followed for positive emotion words. These corrected totals correlated almost perfectly with the uncorrected LIWC counts for both negative emotion words, r(148) = .98, and positive emotion words, r(148) = .97.
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2. In addition to these 49 word count categories, LIWC scores text for an additional 12 elements for a total of 61. These 12 items include variables such as average number of letters in words comprising the text, number of sentences, number of questions, and so on.
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3. The category of unique words should not be confused with the concept of how frequently a given word is used within the general population. Rather, unique words are defined at the level of a particular communication. The number of different words in a given communication divided by total word count is considered unique to that communication. Thus communications with low proportions of unique words are more repetitive in nature than are communications with high proportions of unique words.
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4. Details regarding the reliabilities observed for individual scales and subsets of stimulus persons are available from the authors.
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5. Details of the distributions of the predictor and criterion variables employed in this study are available from the authors.
6.
6. Examination of the beta weights for individual nonverbal predictors from analyses conducted separately for men and women did reveal some interesting trends. To briefly summarize, nonverbal cues tended to be better predictors of impressions of men than of women. As such differences are beyond the scope of this article and did not qualify the relations of the linguistic variables to social perceptions, they will not be discussed further.
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Article first published: May 1997
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