The Relationship Between Personality and Language

Gill, A. J., Nowson, S., & Oberlander, J. (2009). What are they blogging about? Personality, topic and motivation in blogs. In Proceedings of the Third International ICWSM Conference (pp. 18–25). Association for Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved from http://kanagawa.lti.cs.cmu.edu/11719/sites/default/files/Gil-personality.pdf  

In this paper, the authors examine the role of bloggers’ personality in their motivation to blog.  

The authors administered an Internet meme equivalent to a personality test to bloggers according to specific inclusion criteria, yielding 2393 participants who contributed, on average, 2.11 months of blogs. The results for each personality trait were correlated with textual analysis from high-level LIWC categories that identified linguistic features in the blogs’ content (i.e., cognitive mechanisms, sensory and perceptual processes, time, occupation, leisure activities, and physical states and functions as well as various parts of speech). The authors used large-scale blog data to draw correlations with the Big Five personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness), linking specific motivations for each category. In sum, neurotic bloggers had cathartic and auto-therapeutic tendencies, extraverts tended toward high-level life documentation and emotion expression, openness bloggers tended toward commentary and evaluation, and conscientiousness bloggers tended toward reports of daily life. These findings build upon previous literature examining the relationship between personality and language through text analysis of first-person monologue situations (e.g., of essays, emails).

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