BY CHARLES MCCLURE
news@ltveiw.com
Children are fond of saying “sticks and stones my break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Perhaps not, but they may reveal a lot about your personality.

That was the word from Dr. James Pennebaker, the Bush Professor of Liberal Arts and the Departmental Chair in the Psychology Department at the University of Texas at Austin.
Pennebaker was the guest speaker last Sunday at the Viewpoints Lecture series at the Lakeway Activity Center.
“I have been studying for years how our words can effect us – even our behavior, our intentions and even our biological attributes,” Pennebaker said. “Our words are literally biological markers of who we are.”
Pennebaker began scientifically observing how words are used after researching how people reacted after a major upheaval in their lives. A quarter-century later, he has learned a thing or two about what words say about a person and how that will impact their behavior.
“When we face upheavals in our lives, it can influence every aspect of our lives,” Pennebaker said. “There are dozens of studies that show when people face big upheavals, it can impact their health. I learned when people hold a secret for a long time, they are far more likely to suffer illness and even premature death.”
That prompted Pennebaker to wonder what words an individual uses says about their personality, their truthfulness, even their management style.
“Keeping secrets can have a big impact, so we brought people into the lab to study the impact,” Pennebaker said. “Instead of letting them talk, we flipped a coin and decided to let them write about their experiences.”
Pennebaker told those in the study group to write about the most upsetting, disturbing and traumatic experiences of their entire lives.
“I told them that in their writing, to really let go and explore your deepest, most secretive thoughts,” Pennebaker said. “We asked them to write for 15 minutes a day for four consecutive days in the laboratory. As a control condition, we asked 15 others to write about superficial things – how they use their time, what did the room they were in look like – almost silly topics.”
Pennebaker and his colleagues discovered that major life-changing upheavals happen to virtually everyone.
“But those who wrote about their traumatic experiences ended up going to the doctor about half as much as those in the control group did for the next four months [during the study].” Pennebaker said. “I was intrigued.”
So Pennebaker set up another controlled experiment, and this time blood samples were taken from participants before and after the study was completed.
“We were looking for certain markers in the immune system,” Pennebaker said. “We found that those who wrote about traumatic experiences showed improvements in those markers, suggesting that their immune system was more effective in attacking foreign agents.”
That was the beginning. Two-hundred studies later, Pennebaker has come to understand a lot about the words a person uses.
“When people write about traumatic experiences, there are improvements in their physical health,” he said. “We have learned a lot about this through the years.”
By the early 1990s, Pennebaker began studying what constituted “healthy writing.”
“Not everybody who writes about traumatic experiences benefit from the exercise,” Pennebaker said. “It all has to do with the way they write.”
Words like “happy,” “love,” and “caring” are solid indicators of “healthy writing.” He wrote a piece about his findings in 1986 that resulted in a crush of press coverage.
“When individuals write about something, if they write the same story over and over and never change, they just don’t benefit,” Pennebaker said. “People who change in their writing tend to benefit a great deal.”
“Function” words – pronouns – proved particularly interesting.
There were a maze of issues to work through, but he has since learned how writing, and more recently, even spoken words, indicate how people deal with crisis, and about their management styles.
While the manusha was complex, the advent of the Internet helped break his research wide open. He discovered men and women use various types of words more frequently and differently. He even studied the “Nixon tapes” from the Watergate scandal to see if he could get a sense of how people use language and why. The bigger question was, “what does it say about a person?”
“We studied the press conferences of George W. Bush,” Pennebaker said. “We got a real picture of this guy. We saw what most of us see. We saw a guy who is very personable and psychologically connects with people.”
He found Bush’s speech patterns changed when he was deciding what to do concerning various crisis issues. After 9-11, he found Bush used the word “I” much less than before.
“He was concentrating on the crisis – bigger issues,” Pennebaker said. “The same happened after [Hurricane] Katrina.”
One researcher studied Bush’s speech patterns before 9-11 and wrote that the President was not likely to listen to people outside his inner circle.
Pennebaker said researchers are also studying the speech patterns of newly-sworn President Barack Obama, noting his speech patterns indicate that “he is not very personable, which is unusual for successful politicians.”
“I would bet that Obama is not someone who is highly dependent on social approval – he does not need the approval of people around him,” Pennebaker said. “He also doesn’t seem to have an extremely high need for power.”
Pennebaker said that may not tell people too much more than they gathered from watching the two-year-long campaign, but he does believe it backs up his field of research.
“I hope that I give you a taste that the words that we use in everyday life can provide a fascinating insight into who we are and how we approach the world,” he said.
Pennebaker said similar research, including some of his own, has been used for Intelligence applications for various federal agencies.