Language with character: A stratified corpus comparison of individual differences in e-mail communication

Abstract

To what extent does the wording and syntactic form of people's writing reflect their personalities? Using a bottom-up stratified corpus comparison, rather than the top-down content analysis techniques that have been used before, we examine a corpus of e-mail messages elicited from individuals of known personality, as measured by the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (S. Eysenck, Eysenck, & Barrett, 1985). This method allowed us to isolate linguistic features associated with different personality types, via both word and part-of-speech n-gram analysis. We investigated the extent to which extraversion is associated with linguistic features involving positivity, sociability, complexity, and implicitness and neuroticism is associated with negativity, self-concern, emphasis, and implicitness. Numerous interesting features were uncovered. For instance, higher levels of extraversion involved a preference for adjectives, whereas lower levels of neuroticism involved a preference for adverbs. However, neither positivity nor negativity was as prominent as expected, and there was little evidence for implicitness. Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.