About this item

We spend our lives communicating. In the last fifty years, weve zoomed through radically different forms of communication, from typewriters to tablet computers, text messages to tweets. We generate more and more words with each passing day. Hiding in that deluge of language are amazing insights into who we are, how we think, and what we feel.In The Secret Life of Pronouns, social psychologist and language expert James W. Pennebaker uses his groundbreaking research in computational linguistics-in essence, counting the frequency of words we use-to show that our language carries secrets about our feelings, our self-concept, and our social intelligence. Our most forgettable words, such as pronouns and prepositions, can be the most revealing their patterns are as distinctive as fingerprints.



About the Author

James W. Pennebaker

James W. Pennebaker is the Regents Centennial Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the years, he and his students have studied three general topics: the psychology of physical symptoms, the power of expressive writing in helping people cope with upheavals, and, most recently, how the words people use in everyday life reveal their personality and psychological states.



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