The language of regulatory focus: Words used in descriptions of different promotion- and prevention-focused experiences

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Burkins

In research exploring regulatory focus, promotion and prevention have often been operationalized as hopes and duties, respectively. More recently, research has begun to use exploration and self-control instead. The current research analyzed the differences in language used for promotion- and prevention-focused experiences, focusing on duties versus self-control, and hopes versus exploration. I examined the 81 categories of words that Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count provided, focusing on differences in word categories that are used at least 0.5% of the time. Consistent with expectations, descriptions of self-control included more words related to food, exercise, and emotions than descriptions of duties. As expected, descriptions of hopes included more words related to work and achievement than descriptions of exploration. Counter to predictions, exploration did not involve more words in the ingestion, leisure, or motion categories. Similarly, self-control did not involve more words related to sex or money. This research suggests that different operational definitions of regulatory focus could be appropriate to somewhat different domains of activity.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janak Judd

Research on regulatory focus has often used hopes versus duties to operationalize promotion and prevention focus, respectively. The current research examined regulatory focus in terms of exploration versus self-control to determine whether people tend to bring different types of experiences to mind when thinking about these experiences. I used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software to analyze written descriptions of exploration and self-control and used t-tests to examine between-condition differences on word categories that participants used at least 0.5% of the time. Across two studies, descriptions of exploration had more positive emotional tone and used more insight words. In contrast, descriptions of self-control used more function words, more negative emotion words, including anger, more words about ingestion, and more words about power.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leigh Ann Vaughn

People in a prevention focus tend to view their goals as duties and obligations, whereas people in a promotion focus tend to view their goals as hopes and aspirations. The current research suggests that people’s attention goes to somewhat different experiences when they describe their hopes versus duties. Two studies randomly assigned participants (N = 953) to describe a hope versus duty. Specifically, Study 1 asked participants to describe a personal experience of pursuing a hope versus duty, and Study 2 asked participants to describe a current hope versus duty they had. I analyzed these descriptions with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015. Consistent with earlier research on regulatory focus, participants wrote more about positive outcomes when describing hopes and social relationships when describing duties. The current research suggests that the effectiveness of common regulatory focus and regulatory fit manipulations could depend on participants’ freedom to choose the experiences they bring to mind when they describe their hopes and duties.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leigh Ann Vaughn ◽  
Patricia Burkins ◽  
Janak Judd

Exploration and effortful self-control are promotion and prevention-focused experiences. This research examined how exploration and self-control differ in support for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and it compared them to experiences of pursuing hopes and duties, which are common ways to define promotion and prevention focus. It randomly assigned participants (N = 704) to describe a personal experience of exploration or self-control and rate their need support. Analyses compared need support between exploration and self-control conditions, and with the hopes, duties, and “your day yesterday” conditions (N = 867) of previously published data. Need support generally was higher in exploration than self-control. Relationships with the “yesterday” condition were similar to earlier findings on hopes versus duties. The differences in each type of need support between exploration and hopes, and between self-control and duties, were small. This research shows what could be typical need-support differences in episodes of promotion and prevention focus.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 336-343
Author(s):  
Katherine Guttmann ◽  
John Flibotte ◽  
Sara B. DeMauro ◽  
Holli Seitz

This study aimed to evaluate how parents of former neonatal intensive care unit patients with cerebral palsy perceive prognostic discussions following neuroimaging. Parent members of a cerebral palsy support network described memories of prognostic discussions after neuroimaging in the neonatal intensive care unit. We analyzed responses using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, manual content analysis, and thematic analysis. In 2015, a total of 463 parents met eligibility criteria and 266 provided free-text responses. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count analysis showed that responses following neuroimaging contained negative emotion. The most common components identified through the content analysis included outcome, uncertainty, hope/hopelessness, and weakness in communication. Thematic analysis revealed 3 themes: (1) Information, (2) Communication, and (3) Impact. Parents of children with cerebral palsy report weakness in communication relating to prognosis, which persists in parents’ memories. Prospective work to develop interventions to improve communication between parents and providers in the neonatal intensive care unit is necessary.


2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-14
Author(s):  
Corrin G. Richels ◽  
Rogge Jessica

Purpose: Deficits in the ability to use emotion vocabulary may result in difficulties for adolescents who stutter (AWS) and may contribute to disfluencies and stuttering. In this project, we aimed to describe the emotion words used during conversational speech by AWS. Methods: Participants were 26 AWS between the ages of 12 years, 5 months and 15 years, 11 months-old (n=4 females, n=22 males). We drew personal narrative samples from the UCLASS database. We used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to analyze data samples for numbers of emotion words. Results: Results indicated that the AWS produced significantly higher numbers of emotion words with a positive valence. AWS tended to use the same few positive emotion words to the near exclusion of words with negative emotion valence. Conclusion: A lack of diversity in emotion vocabulary may make it difficult for AWS to engage in meaningful discourse about negative aspects of being a person who stutters


First Monday ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Robertshaw ◽  
Ivana Babicova

This study aimed to record and characterise tweets related to dementia, to investigate their content and sentiment. Data were extracted from Twitter over a period of six weeks during February and March 2019 and then analysed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and AntWordProfiler. Using five search terms related to dementia, this study collected 860,383 tweets (more than 27 million words). Results have shown that out of all the collected tweets, 48.63 percent of tweets related to the search term ‘dementia’, 49.95 percent to ‘Alzheimer’s disease’ and the remainder related to frontotemporal dementia, Lewy Body dementia and vascular dementia. People wrote more positively and personally about the term ‘dementia’ than the other terms, and more technically regarding the term ‘Alzheimer’s disease’. All search terms had a negative emotional tone overall. Dementia and related terms are commonly discussed on Twitter. The overall negative emotional tone associated with all dementia related search terms suggests that dementia is still largely stigmatised and talked about negatively. Recommendations for future research include the development of a health world list or a dementia world list, and to consider how the results of this research inform social change interventions going forwards.


Author(s):  
Cindy K. Chung ◽  
James W. Pennebaker

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007) is a word counting software program that references a dictionary of grammatical, psychological, and content word categories. LIWC has been used to efficiently classify texts along psychological dimensions and to predict behavioral outcomes, making it a text analysis tool widely used in the social sciences. LIWC can be considered to be a tool for applied natural language processing since, beyond classification, the relative uses of various LIWC categories can reflect the underlying psychology of demographic characteristics, honesty, health, status, relationship quality, group dynamics, or social context. By using a comparison group or longitudinal information, or validation with other psychological measures, LIWC analyses can be informative of a variety of psychological states and behaviors. Combining LIWC categories using new algorithms or using the processor to assess new categories and languages further extend the potential applications of LIWC.


2007 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey H. Kahn ◽  
Renée M. Tobin ◽  
Audra E. Massey ◽  
Jennifer A. Anderson

2011 ◽  
Vol 109 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lester ◽  
Stephanie McSwain

Changes in the words used in the poems of Sylvia Plath were examined using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a computer program for analyzing the content of texts. Major changes in the content of her poems were observed over the course of Plath's career, as well as in the final year of her life. As the time of her suicide came closer, words expressing positive emotions became more frequent, while words concerned with causation and insight became less frequent.


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