O świadomości genologicznej Józefa Piłsudskiego (rekonesans)

The article describes Józef Piłsudski’s texts on various types of speech. The bibliography of Piłudski’s works includes over thirty types of speech, which speaks to his linguistic agility. Our outline includes the analysis of four selected types of texts: aphorism, diatribe, denunciation and feuilleton written in various times in the course of his life. All of them were persuasive in nature and were written using a highly emotional language.

Negativity Spreads More than Positivity on Twitter After Both Positive and Negative Political Situations

What type of emotional language spreads further in political discourses on social media? Previous research has focused on situations that primarily elicited negative emotions, showing that negative language tended to spread further. The current project extends existing knowledge by examining the spread of emotional language in response to both predominantly positive and negative political situations. In Study 1, we examined the spread of emotional language in tweets related to the winning and losing parties in the 2016 US elections, finding that increased negativity (but not positivity) predicted content sharing in both situations. In Study 2, we compared the spread of emotional language in two separate situations: the celebration of the US Supreme Court approval of same-sex marriage (positive) and the Ferguson unrest (negative), finding again that negativity spread further. These results shed light on the nature of political discourse and engagement.

Emotional word use in informal dementia carers: A linguistic analysis of online discussion forums (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Growing numbers of informal dementia carers are turning to online discussion forums for support. Research has explored emotional word use on online discussion forums as a proxy for underlying emotional functioning. We are not aware of any research that has analysed the content of posts on discussion forums specific to dementia carers in order to examine their emotional states. OBJECTIVE We address the following research questions: 1) To what extent does emotional language use differ between dementia carers and non-carers? 2) To what extent does emotional language use differ between spousal and parental carers? 3) To what extent does emotional language use differ between current and former carers? METHODS We used the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count programme to examine emotional word use on a UK-based online forum for informal dementia carers and a discussion forum control group. Carers were separated into different subgroups for the analysis: current and former; and spousal and parental. RESULTS We found that dementia carers used significantly more negative, but not positive, emotion words than non-carers. Spousal carers used more emotion words overall than parental carers, specifically more negative emotion words. Former carers used more emotional words overall than current carers, specifically more positive words. CONCLUSIONS The findings suggest that informal dementia carers may be at increased risk of negative emotional states, relative to non-carers. Greater negativity in spousal carers may be explained by increased caregiver burden, whereas greater positivity in former carers may be explained by functional relief of caregiving responsibilities. The theoretical/applied relevance of these findings is discussed.

Facing the music: Stereotyping of and by women in US music journalism

This study updates and expands the application of stereotyping and professional socialization to music journalism in a way that is generalizable to the United States music journalism industry, and seeks to understand the role women journalists play in counteracting or perpetuating stereotyping of women musicians. A content analysis of 936 articles finds significant stereotyping of women musicians in major US music publications during 2016. The stories, randomly sampled from eight top US publications, were predominantly about men artists and by men authors, and were more likely to discuss women musicians’ appearance and relationships, and used more sexualized and emotional language. Improvement was found in that articles were no more likely to discuss women musicians’ age and youth than men’s. Women journalists were just as likely to stereotype women musicians as men journalists were, and more so in one category. We expand stereotyping by incorporating insights from professional socialization and applying it to the ‘soft news’ yet male-dominated field of music journalism, adding to our knowledge of hard news fields such as politics, business and sports. It also updates the few studies of music journalism from decades ago, showing little progress in the blatant stereotyping of women musicians

Specificity of Interpretation of a Scientific Text in the Humanitarian Knowledge of the World

The given article is devoted to the interpretation of a scientific text in the framework of humanitarian knowledge of the world. The author covers theoretical aspects of intersubjective communication. The specificity of the analysis of this type of text is to address the mental and social state of the scientist's personality. The article systematizes the dominant syntactic means that characterize the process of cognition. Special attention is paid to emotional language means and their connection with evaluative meaning.

Delayed Responses to Threatening Speech as a Function of Behavioural Inhibition

The present study investigates how trait anxiety affects speech processing, and whether anxiety has different processing consequences depending on speech informational properties. Participants listened to sentences in a go/no-go task where they were asked to respond to threat, which could be present in semantics, prosody or both. In one experiment they were asked to attend to prosody only and ignore semantics, and in the other, attend to semantics and ignore prosody. Trait anxiety was measured psychometrically using a behavioural inhibition scale questionnaire. In both studies, increased trait anxiety had substantial effects in slowing reaction times, but did not affect accuracy We suggest that increased anxiety induces participants to over-engage with threat, which is reflected in slower but not much less accurate responses. We adduce that phasic models of emotional language processing and anxiety can be bridged together by proposing a specific mechanism disrupting late phase processing, where orientation and/or deliberation processes occur. We propose that verbal repetitive thinking, as associated with anxious rumination and worry, can fulfil this disruptive role.

Negativity Spreads More than Positivity on Twitter after both Positive and Negative Political Situations

What type of emotional language spreads further in political discourses on social media? Previous research has focused on situations that primarily elicited negative emotions, showing that negative language tended to spread further. The current project addressed the gap introduced when looking only at negative situations by comparing the spread of emotional language in response to both predominantly positive and negative political situations. In Study 1, we examined the spread of emotional language among tweets related to the winning and losing parties in the 2016 US elections, finding that increased negativity (but not positivity) predicted content sharing in both situations. In Study 2, we compared the spread of emotional language in two separate situations: the celebration of the US Supreme Court approval of same-sex marriage (positive), and the Ferguson Unrest (negative), finding again that negativity spread further. These results shed light on the nature of political discourse and engagement.