Women are widely assumed to be more talkative than men. Challenging this assumption, Mehl et al. (2007) provided empirical evidence that men and women do not differ significantly in their daily word use, speaking about 16,000 words per day (WPD) each.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) are the most common medical conditions in pregnancy and a leading cause of maternal morbidity and mortality in the United States. There are few interventions available to prevent HDP, and those currently available do not target underlying mechanisms of disease. Mindfulness training (MT) is effective at reducing blood pressure in non-pregnant patients with pre-hypertension and hypertension and has proven more effective at blood pressure reduction than other stress management interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo address the challenge of predicting psychological response to a psychosocial intervention we tested the possibility that baseline gene expression profiles might provide information above and beyond baseline psychometric measures. The genomics strategy utilized individual level inferences of transcription factor activity to predict changes in loneliness and affect in response to two well-established meditation interventions. Initial algorithm development analyses focused on three a-priori defined stress-related gene regulation pathways (CREB, GR, and NF-ĸB) as inferred from TELiS promoter-based bioinformatic analysis of basal (pre-intervention) blood samples from a randomized-controlled trial comparing a compassion-based meditation (CM, n = 45) with mindfulness meditation (MM, n = 44).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFor the longest time, the gold standard in preparing spoken language corpora for text analysis in psychology was using human transcription. However, such standard comes at extensive cost, and creates barriers to quantitative spoken language analysis that recent advances in speech-to-text technology could address. The current study quantifies the accuracy of AI-generated transcripts compared to human-corrected transcripts across younger (n = 100) and older (n = 92) adults and two spoken language tasks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNatural language use is a promising candidate for the development of innovative measures of well-being to complement self-report measures. The type of words individuals use can reveal important psychological processes that underlie well-being across the lifespan. In this preregistered, cross-sectional study, we propose a conceptual model of language markers of well-being and use written narratives about healthy aging (N = 701) and computerized text analysis (LIWC) to empirically validate the model.
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