Interactional Adjustment: Three Approaches in Language and Social Psychology

© The Author(s) 2020. Interactional adjustment refers to people’s tendency to adjust, or adapt, their communication behavior in social interactions. In recent years, three distinctive approaches to this topic that have featured prominently in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology are communication accommodation theory (CAT), language style matching (LSM), and discursive psychology using conversation analysis (DPCA). In this article, we provide a review of these three approaches, highlighting what defines and distinguishes them, as well as what insights into interactional adjustment each offers. We draw out the connections and points of tensions between these approaches; in so doing, we identify future directions for research on interactional adjustment as a fundamental aspect of human communication, and in the study of language and social psychology.

Interactional Adjustment: Three Approaches in Language and Social Psychology

© The Author(s) 2020. Interactional adjustment refers to people’s tendency to adjust, or adapt, their communication behavior in social interactions. In recent years, three distinctive approaches to this topic that have featured prominently in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology are communication accommodation theory (CAT), language style matching (LSM), and discursive psychology using conversation analysis (DPCA). In this article, we provide a review of these three approaches, highlighting what defines and distinguishes them, as well as what insights into interactional adjustment each offers. We draw out the connections and points of tensions between these approaches; in so doing, we identify future directions for research on interactional adjustment as a fundamental aspect of human communication, and in the study of language and social psychology.

Finding uncommon ground: Extremist online forum engagement predicts integrative complexity

How do interactions with an ideologically extreme online community affect cognition? In this paper, we examine whether engagement with an online neo-Nazi forum is associated with more one-sided, “black and white” thinking. Using naturalistic language data, we examined differences in integrative complexity, a measure of the degree to which people acknowledge and reconcile conflicting ideas and viewpoints, and contrasted it with Language Style Matching, a measure of group cohesion. In a large web scraping study (N = 1,891), we tested whether two measures of engagement and interaction with the community are associated with less complex, balanced cognition. Using hierarchical regression modeling, we found that both individuals who had been community members for longer and those who had posted more tended to show less complexity in their language, even when accounting for mean differences between individuals. However, these differences in integrative complexity were distinct from group cohesion, which actually decreased with our measures of engagement. Despite small effect sizes, these findings indicate that ideologically extreme online communities may exacerbate the views of their members and contribute to ever-widening polarized cognitions.

Interactional Adjustment: Three Approaches in Language and Social Psychology

Interactional adjustment refers to people’s tendency to adjust, or adapt, their communication behavior in social interactions. In recent years, three distinctive approaches to this topic that have featured prominently in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology are communication accommodation theory (CAT), language style matching (LSM), and discursive psychology using conversation analysis (DPCA). In this article, we provide a review of these three approaches, highlighting what defines and distinguishes them, as well as what insights into interactional adjustment each offers. We draw out the connections and points of tensions between these approaches; in so doing, we identify future directions for research on interactional adjustment as a fundamental aspect of human communication, and in the study of language and social psychology.

Assessing College Writing: Do Students Connect with the Text?

Reading-response research has shown that students respond to a text by engaging various cognitive and emotional processes. The aim of the current study was to examine students’ written reactions to an assigned reading as a way to determine (1) whether students connect with the reading and (2) the differing cognitive styles they may utilize in their reactions. The methods applied two text-analytic procedures to 238 student reactions to an ethics case study. The procedures were language style matching, which is a metric of engagement, and the categorical-dynamic index, which is a metric of analytic and experiential processing. We predicted that students who more strongly connected—or engaged—with the text would also demonstrate greater analytic thinking in their written response and, conversely, those who weakly connected with the text would express a more informal response based on experience. The data were analyzed using correlation statistics. The results showed that students whose writing more closely matched with the linguistic style of the case study were more likely to use an analytical style of writing, and students whose writing weakly matched the linguistic style of the case study were more likely to use an informal narrative style of writing. Future research should examine the extent to which language style matching and an associated analytic cognitive style are emergent skills that develop over the course of a college experience. References Baddeley, J.L. (2012). E-mail communications among people with and without major depressive disorder (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX Blackburn, K.G. (2015). The narrative arc: Exploring the linguistic structure of the narrative (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas. Chung, C., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2007). The psychological functions of function words. Social Communication, 1, 343-359. Ireland, M. E., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010). Language style matching in writing: Synchrony in essays, correspondence, and poetry. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(3), 549. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020386 Ireland, M.E., Slatcher, R.B., Eastwick, P.W., Scissors, L.E., Finkel, E.J., & Pennebaker, J.W. (2011). Language style matching predicts relationship initiation and stability. Psychological Science, 22(1), 39-44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610392928 Inbar, Y., Cone, J., & Gilovich, T. (2010). People’s intuitions about intuitive insight and intuitive choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99, 232–247. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020215 Jordan, K. N., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2017). The exception or the rule: Using words to assess analytic thinking, Donald Trump, and the American presidency. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 3(3), 312-316. https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000125 Jordan, K. N., Sterling, J., Pennebaker, J. W., & Boyd, R. L. (2019). 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Associations between language style matching and relationship commitment and satisfaction: An integrative data analysis

Language style matching (LSM) refers to similarity in function word use between two people during a conversation. Previous research has shown that LSM predicts romantic relationship stability, but it remains unknown why LSM is associated with stability. Across five studies from five different labs, we aimed to identify links between LSM and two relationship perceptions strongly associated with stability: commitment and satisfaction. Based on prior work, we hypothesized that LSM would be associated with commitment but not satisfaction. This hypothesis was supported in Study 1 ( N = 82) but was not supported in Study 2 ( N = 158). Preregistered analyses of three additional data sets ( N = 198, 190, 138) were then conducted to attempt to replicate the effect between commitment and LSM. The predicted associations between LSM and commitment/satisfaction, measured concurrently and longitudinally, were not observed in Studies 3–5. Moreover, a meta-analysis across all 766 individuals ( N = 383 couples) revealed that although the association between LSM and satisfaction was marginal ( M r = .10, Z = 1.92, p = .05, confidence interval (CI) = −.002, .203), there was no link between LSM and commitment ( M r = .05, Z = 0.97, p = .33, CI = −.052, .154). Across conflict discussions (i.e., in Studies 1 and 3–5), there were no associations between conflict LSM and satisfaction ( M r = .09, Z = 1.49, p = .14, CI = −.028, .203) or commitment ( M r = .03, Z = 0.50, p = .62, CI = −.087, .145). These findings suggest that if true associations between LSM and commitment and satisfaction exist, they are very small effects. They also emphasize the importance of replicating one’s own findings and illustrate a fruitful approach to replicating findings from high-investment studies through collaborating with researchers with similar data sets to increase statistical power and, in turn, reproducibility.

A new approach to capturing pain disclosure in daily life in-person and online

This feasibility study employed a new approach to capturing pain disclosure in face-to-face and online interactions, using a newly developed tool. In Study 1, 13 rheumatoid arthritis and 52 breast cancer patients wore the Electronically Activated Recorder to acoustically sample participants’ natural conversations. Study 2 obtained data from two publicly available online social networks: fibromyalgia (343,439 posts) and rheumatoid arthritis (12,430 posts). Pain disclosure, versus non-pain disclosure, posts had a greater number of replies, and greater engagement indexed by language style matching. These studies yielded novel, multimethod evidence of how pain disclosure unfolds in naturally occurring social contexts in everyday life.