The effect of fear on language use

Objective: The present study examined how fear inﬂuences language use. Based on the feelings-as-information theory (Schwarz & Clore, 1983, 1988), we hypothesized that people experiencing a high-arousal negative affective state (speciﬁcally, fear) would use a more detail-oriented processing style than people experiencing a low-arousal positive affective state. We believed that this difference in processing style would lead to differences in language use. In accordance with two recent studies regarding affect and language use (Argaman, 2010; Beukeboom & Semin, 2006), we predicted that frightened people would use more pronouns, verbs, words related to affect, and words related to space, while non-frightened people would use more adjectives and nouns. Methods: Sixty-nine participants either played the horror survival computer game Slender: Prison or the non-frightening adventure computer game realMYST . In both games, participants had to ﬁnd a number of hidden objects and at the same time report where these hidden objects were. These reports were recorded under the pretence that a future participant would play the same computer game and would listen to the previous participant’s report to ﬁnd the hidden objects more easily. The mood manipulation was checked using questionnaires and cortisol measurements. We expected frightened participants to produce higher salivary cortisol concentrations during the experiment than non-frightened participants. Twenty-two participants were excluded because they did not get frightened while playing Slender: Prison or because they did get frightened while playing realMYST . Fourty-four participants’ reports were transcribed and analysed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program (Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007). Results: The analysis showed that frightened participants used signiﬁcantly more pronouns, verbs, and words related to affect than non-frightened participants while reporting their gaming progress. No signiﬁcant differences were found in the use of adjectives, nouns, and words related to space. Surprisingly, the frightened participants did not produce higher salivary cortisol concentrations during the experiment than the non-frightened participants. Discussion: We conclude that fear causes at least three systematic differences in language use, namely the increased use of pronouns, verbs, and words related to affect. We argue that the frightened participants used more verbs than the non-frightened participants, because their negative affective state caused them to focus more on details. Consequently, they used more concrete predicates such as verbs (Beukeboom & Semin, 2006). Furthermore, we propose that the frightened participants used more pronouns and words related to affect than the non-frightened participants, because their feelings of fear caused them to be more self-focused, meaning that they paid more attention to their actions, thoughts, and feelings. The frightened participants probably were more self-focused because self-focus facilitates problem-solving, and fear is often triggered by problematic situations. An increased self-focus has been found to cause the increased use of (ﬁrst person) pronouns and words related to affect before (Rude, Gortner, & Pennebaker, 2004). Future research should continue to examine how different affective states, and speciﬁcally, which features of affective states (such as valence, arousal, or self-focus), inﬂuence language use.