Personality and language: the projection and perception of personality in computer-mediated communication

Personality plays an important role in socialisation and collaboration, and people are able to form accurate impressions of other's personality from face-to-face interaction. However, the growing use of computer-mediated communication means that individu¬ als are often faced with purely textual means for the projection or perception of person¬ ality. This thesis focuses on the projection and perception of personality in informal e-mail text of native English speakers. Here we examine the major personality traits of Extraversion (sociability) and Neuroticism (emotional stability), and also Psychoticism (tough mindedness). There are two hypotheses: Firstly, that personality is projected linguistically; Secondly, that personality can be perceived through language. Results were found supporting the two hypotheses, and the thesis has implications for the un¬ derstanding of personality and language production and for methodology. These main findings are summarised as follows: Personality is projected through language. Previous research has shown that contentanalysis measures relate to personality. However, such top-down methods are often limited by constraints imposed by the analysis technique. Here it is shown that datadriven approaches from corpus linguistics—which provide more sophisticated infor¬ mation about context, syntax, and semantics—can give further characterisation of per¬ sonality in language. Personality is perceived through language. Personality can be perceived through face-to-face communication, internet chatroom environments and by observing strangers Here, personality perception research is extended to the rating of short e-mail texts of around 200 words. It is shown that personality can be perceived, but as in other stud¬ ies, this is mediated by each trait's observability and evaluativeness, and also by the environment. Individual differences influence theories of language production. By using several different approaches to the analysis of personality language, it is shown that different personality traits influence different levels of language production. New methodologies can inform individual differences. The adoption of techniques from computational corpus linguistics has revealed new features of personality lan¬ guage, and provided techniques more sensitive to smaller or non-standard data sets. iii Acknowledgements Gratitude is firstly due to my supervisors: To Jon Oberlander, for his encouragement and enthusiasm throughout this project, and also for his great generosity of time, en¬ ergy and resources; To Richard Shillcock, for giving me the freedom to pursue various ideas, and for his insightful comments and discussions. Acknowledgement is also due to Elizabeth Austin, for her advice and guidance throughout, and also to my examiners Joe Levy and Helen Pain for the interesting (and somewhat lengthy! ) viva and for their comments which helped smooth some of the rougher edges of my thesis. I also gratefully acknowledge the Economic and Social Research Council, and the School of Informatics, for their financial support; Paul Rayson of UCREL, Lancaster University, for providing me with access to his corpus software; Betty Hughes and the staff of the ICCS/HCRC offices for making everything run smoothly behind the scenes; and also Tarn Jardine for keeping me smiling, whatever the weather. I would also like to thank my colleagues who have who have provided comments, discussion, enthusiasm, encouragement and technical advice on various aspects of this project: James Curran, Mary Ellen Foster, Frank Keller, Mirella Lapata and Padraic Monaghan. More generally, I also recognise those who, years previously, have shaped my cur¬ rent academic thinking: Steven Emsley for arousing my interest in language, and Chris Butler for recognising and directing this interest. I am also grateful for the encourage¬ ment and friendship they have offered since. Thanks to Chris in particular for his words of support which convinced me to persevere. For their companionship along the journey I would like to acknowledge Conor Snowden and Tim Willis, in addition to my long-suffering friends, flatmates and officemates who have had to cope with me on a daily basis: their friendship and humour have allowed me to see the more amusing side of things. Last but by no means least, I acknowledge my parents for their love and support over the many years, and who have made this possible. This work is dedicated to the memory of the paternal and maternal grandparents that I knew: To Mrs Edith Gill, I trust this is a fitting tribute to her vision and provision, and to Mr John James Lister, who taught me the important things not learnt through formal education.