An increasing number of people are turning to online blogging communities devoted to self-change for smoking, shopping, and other behaviors. To understand processes underlying effective self-change, the current project tracked the language and social dynamics of a dieting blog community using computerized text analysis. Three research questions were asked: What predicts weight loss in blogs? What changes in blogging predict weight loss? Can we predict...

The diaries of 1,084 U.S. users of an on-line journaling service were downloaded for a period of 4 months spanning the 2 months prior to and after the September 11 attacks. Linguistic analyses of the journal entries revealed pronounced psychological changes in response to the attacks. In the short term, participants expressed more negative emotions, were more cognitively and socially engaged, and wrote with greater...

During his years as mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani was perceived as undergoing changes in personality as a result of a number of personal crises and, later, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. One method by which to study individual differences is to explore the natural use of language of an individual. Giuliani's use of language was...

Objective The purpose of this study was to determine whether distinctive features of language could be discerned in the poems of poets who committed suicide and to test two suicide models by use of a text-analysis program. Method Approximately 300 poems from the early, middle, and late periods of nine suicidal poets and nine nonsuicidal poets were compared by use of the computer text analysis program, Linguistic Inquiry...

Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) is a tool to assess the veracity of written statements, and is used as evidence in criminal courts in several countries in the world. CBCA scores are expected to be higher for truth tellers than for liars. The underlying assumption of CBCA is that (i) lying is cognitively more difficult than truth telling, and (ii) that liars are more concerned with...

This study examines self-presentation in online dating profiles using a novel cross-validation technique for establishing accuracy. Eighty online daters rated the accuracy of their online self-presentation. Information about participants' physical attributes was then collected (height, weight, and age) and compared with their online profile, revealing that deviations tended to be ubiquitous but small in magnitude. Men lied more about their height, and women lied more...

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software was used to code truthful and deceptive words in prisoners' natural language. Reality Monitoring (RM) and Newman, Pennebaker, Berry, & Richards' (NP, 2003) models were used. NP indicates that lies contain fewer self‐references, other references, and exclusive words, and higher numbers of negative emotion and motion words. Higher sensory, spatial, temporal and affective RM terms were predicted for...

Past research on verbal deception has found inconsistent patterns, possibly due to failure to consider the dynamic nature of interpersonal deception. The current investigation examined temporal changes and sequencing effects in truthful and deceptive responding on 23 linguistic measures. Interviewees responded to 12 questions during which they alternated between giving blocks of truthful and blocks of deceptive answers. Results showed significant variability in verbal behavior...

Research suggests that most people cannot tell from demeanor when others are lying. Such poor performance is typical not only of laypeople but also of most professionals concerned with lying. In this study, three professional groups with special interest or skill in deception, two law-enforcement groups and a select group of clinical psychologists, obtained high accuracy in judging videotapes of people who were lying or...

Telling lies often requires creating a story about an experience or attitude that does not exist. As a result, false stories may be qualitatively different from true stories. The current project investigated the features of linguistic style that distinguish between true and false stories. In an analysis of five independent samples, a computer-based text analysis program correctly classified liars and truth-tellers at a rate of...