WHC Professor Publishes in Nature: Human Behaviour

whcprofessornature


Monday, Apr 09, 2018

April 9, 2018 – In a novel study, “Personality Development through Natural Language,” published in the international journal, Nature: Human Behaviour, Kevin Lanning, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a professor of psychology in the Wilkes Honors College, together with FAU Wilkes Honors College alumna Rachel (Evans) Pauletti, and collaborators Laura A. King, Ph.D., University of Missouri, and Dan P. McAdams, Ph.D., Northwestern University, examined how personality maturation or development was reflected in natural language.

Results from the study find that throughout the course of development, language indicative of self-centeredness (e.g., using the word “I”) decreased, while complexity (words such as “but” and “although”) increased. LIWC categories associated with informality (leisure, assent) and impulse (anger, swear words, sexual, body, ingestion) were generally associated with declining ego level, while the relationship of ego development to verbosity or response length showed the greatest increases at the later stages of development. Taken together, these and other results provide support for the claim that ego development can be understood as a set of qualitatively distinct stages as well as a single dimension. Learn More.

©