Talking Cancer-Cancer Talking: A Linguistic and Thematic Analysis of Patient Narratives.

To explore "the lived experience" of patients with cancer through narratives, in-depth interviews with 20 patients were conducted in the patients' homes-"at the kitchen table." Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed following the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) methodology. Thematic Analysis was used to explore themes in the narratives.

How developments in natural language processing help us in understanding human behaviour.

The ways people use language can reveal clues to their emotions, social behaviours, thinking styles, cultures and the worlds around them. In the past two decades, research at the intersection of social psychology and computer science has been developing tools to analyse natural language from written or spoken text to better understand social processes and behaviour. The goal of this Review is to provide a brief overview of the methods and data currently being used and to discuss the underlying meaning of what language analyses can reveal in comparison with more traditional methodologies such as surveys or hand-scored language samples.

Study protocol for writing to heal: A culturally based brief expressive writing intervention for Chinese immigrant breast cancer survivors.

Background: This study uses a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to test the health benefits of expressive writing that is culturally adapted for Chinese immigrant breast cancer survivors (BCSs) and to characterize how acculturation moderates the effects of expressive writing interventions.

Methods: We will recruit Chinese immigrant BCSs (N = 240) diagnosed with stage 0-III breast cancer and within 5 years of completion of primary treatment. Recruitment will occur primarily through community-based organizations and cancer registries.

Comparing the language style of heads of state in the US, UK, Germany and Switzerland during COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic posed a global threat to nearly every society around the world. Individuals turned to their political leaders to safely guide them through this crisis. The most direct way political leaders communicated with their citizens was through official speeches and press conferences.

Quantifying the narrative flow of imagined versus autobiographical stories.

Lifelong experiences and learned knowledge lead to shared expectations about how common situations tend to unfold. Such knowledge of narrative event flow enables people to weave together a story. However, comparable computational tools to evaluate the flow of events in narratives are limited.

Tracking group identity through natural language within groups.

To what degree can we determine people's connections with groups through the language they use? In recent years, large archives of behavioral data from social media communities have become available to social scientists, opening the possibility of tracking naturally occurring group identity processes. A feature of most digital groups is that they rely exclusively on the written word. Across 3 studies, we developed and validated a language-based metric of group identity strength and demonstrated its potential in tracking identity processes in online communities.

Social Media Discussions Predict Mental Health Consultations on College Campuses.

The mental health of college students is a growing concern, and gauging the mental health needs of college students is difficult to assess in real-time and in scale. To address this gap, researchers and practitioners have encouraged the use of passive technologies. Social media is one such "passive sensor" that has shown potential as a viable "passive sensor" of mental health.

Social media conversations reveal large psychological shifts caused by COVID-19's onset across U.S. cities.

The current research chronicles the unfolding of the early psychological impacts of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) by analyzing Reddit language from 18 U.S. cities (200,000+ people) and large-scale survey data (11,000+ people).

Climate Denial Fuels Climate Change Discussions More Than Local Climate-Related Disasters.

Most scientists agree that climate change is the largest existential threat of our time. Despite the magnitude of the threat, surprisingly few climate-related discussions take place on social media. What factors drive online discussions about climate change? In this study, we examined the occurrence of Reddit discussions around three types of climate-related events: natural disasters (e.

Hearing Aid Consumer Reviews: A Linguistic Analysis in Relation to Benefit and Satisfaction Ratings.

Purpose Online reviews have been used by hearing aid owners to share their experiences and to provide suggestions to potential hearing aid buyers, although they have not been systematically examined. The study was aimed at examining the hearing aid consumer reviews using automated linguistic analysis, and how the linguistic variables relate to self-reported hearing aid benefit and satisfaction ratings. Method The study used a cross-sectional design.

Hearing aid acquisition and ownership: what can we learn from online consumer reviews?

Objective: To explore the publicised opinions of consumers actively participating in online hearing aid reviews.

Design: A retrospective design examining data generated from an online consumer review website (www.HearingTracker.

A New Pathway to University Retention? Identity Fusion With University Predicts Retention Independently of Grades.

Individuals who are "strongly fused" with a group view the group as self-defining. As such, they should be particularly reluctant to leave it. For the first time, we investigate the implications of identity fusion for university retention.

A Mentored Pathway into the Sciences for Underrepresented Populations: A Newly Crafted Educational Modality for Women Exploring Career Opportunities in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine.

The barriers generally facing women wishing to pursue careers in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) in the United States have been well described. However, additional layers of cultural beliefs and needs may pose further obstructions to women in certain cultural subgroups who wish to enter STEMM. Recognition of the challenges faced by such subgroups is important and culturally sensitive educational and training approaches may be necessary.

Language left behind on social media exposes the emotional and cognitive costs of a romantic breakup.

Using archived social media data, the language signatures of people going through breakups were mapped. Text analyses were conducted on 1,027,541 posts from 6,803 Reddit users who had posted about their breakups. The posts include users' Reddit history in the 2 y surrounding their breakups across the various domains of their life, not just posts pertaining to their relationship.

Stereotyping in the digital age: Male language is "ingenious", female language is "beautiful" - and popular.

The huge power for social influence of digital media may come with the risk of intensifying common societal biases, such as gender and age stereotypes. Speaker's gender and age also behaviorally manifest in language use, and language may be a powerful tool to shape impact. The present study took the example of TED, a highly successful knowledge dissemination platform, to study online influence.

Natural emotion vocabularies as windows on distress and well-being.

To date we know little about natural emotion word repertoires, and whether or how they are associated with emotional functioning. Principles from linguistics suggest that the richness or diversity of individuals' actively used emotion vocabularies may correspond with their typical emotion experiences. The current investigation measures active emotion vocabularies in participant-generated natural speech and examined their relationships to individual differences in mood, personality, and physical and emotional well-being.

The narrative arc: Revealing core narrative structures through text analysis.

Scholars across disciplines have long debated the existence of a common structure that underlies narratives. Using computer-based language analysis methods, several structural and psychological categories of language were measured across ~40,000 traditional narratives (e.g.

Optimal sampling strategies for characterizing behavior and affect from ambulatory audio recordings.

Advances in mobile and wearable technologies mean it is now feasible to record hours to days of participant behavior in its naturalistic context, a great boon for psychologists interested in family processes and development. While automated activity recognition algorithms exist for a limited set of behaviors, time-consuming human annotations are still required to robustly characterize the vast majority of behavioral and affective markers of interest. This report is the first to date which systematically tests the efficacy of different sampling strategies for characterizing behavior from audio recordings to provide practical guidelines for researchers.

How do online learners study? The psychometrics of students' clicking patterns in online courses.

College students' study strategies were explored by tracking the ways they navigated the websites of two large (Ns of 1384 and 671) online introductory psychology courses. Students' study patterns were measured analyzing the ways they clicked outside of the regularly scheduled class on study materials within the online Learning Management System. Three main effects emerged: studying course content materials (as opposed to course logistics materials) outside of class and higher grades are consistently correlated; studying at any time except in the late night/early morning hours was strongly correlated with grades; students with higher Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores made higher grades but accessed course materials at lower rates that those with lower SATs.

Examining long-term trends in politics and culture through language of political leaders and cultural institutions.

From many perspectives, the election of Donald Trump was seen as a departure from long-standing political norms. An analysis of Trump's word use in the presidential debates and speeches indicated that he was exceptionally informal but at the same time, spoke with a sense of certainty. Indeed, he is lower in analytic thinking and higher in confidence than almost any previous American president.

Which Aspects of Positive Affect Are Related to Mortality? Results From a General Population Longitudinal Study.

Background: Previous research has shown a link between low positive affect and mortality, but questions remain about how positive affect is related to mortality and how this differs by gender and age.

Purpose: To investigate the relationships between positive affect, negative affect, and mortality in a general population sample, and to examine whether these relationships were related to age, sex, or cause-specific mortality.

Methods: We used data from 5,554 Norwegian participants aged 47-49 and 71-74 years who completed the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) and also provided data on demographics, health behaviors, and physical health as part of the Hordaland Health Study.

Googling Gout: Exploring Perceptions About Gout Through a Linguistic Analysis of Online Search Activities.

Objective: To understand what terms people seeking information about gout use most frequently in online searches and to explore the psychological and emotional tone of these searches.

Methods: A large de-identified data set of search histories from major search engines was analyzed. Participants who searched for gout (n = 1,117), arthritis (arthritis search control group, age and sex-matched, n = 2,036), and a random set of age and sex-matched participants (general control group, n = 2,150) were included.