When people wore the EAR

"The EAR yielded a wealth of interesting facts about the ways people live their lives. It showed that, despite the variety of things each of us do, we are unmistakably creatures of habit. When people wore the EAR for two days and then for two more days four weeks later, they were remarkably consistent in how they interacted with others, in the kinds of things they did, and in the places they frequented.
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Swear words and fillers, and, in fact, all the words we use reflect our personalities. In another venture into personality snooping, James Pennebaker and Laura King used a computer program to dissect the elements of language in eight hundred people's writing samples. They found that extraverts tend to use language about social events and positive emotions and to avoid words that express negative emotions; they also tend to make distinctions through exclusive words (but, without, except), tentative words (perhaps, maybe), and negations (no, not, never). People high on openness tend to have a different pattern--they use fewer first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) and more articles (a, an, the) and long words while avoiding verbs in the present tense than people lower on this trait. People high on neuroticism tend to use a lot of first-person singular pronouns, fewer articles, and fewer words expressing positive emotion than negative emotion. In fact, differences in the use of first-person singular pronouns show up in many of Pennebaker's findings. Who would you think uses I, me, my more often in the following groups: high- versus low-status people; suicidal vs. nonsuicidal poets; women or men; depressed or nondepressed people. Pennebaker uses I, me, my as a linguistic marker of self-focus and has found higher rates of usage in women (vs. men), low-status (vs. high-status) people, suicidal (vs. nonsuicidal) poets, and depressed (vs. nondepressed) people" (108-9).