Spring Break
'It's not you, it's me'
Professor studies what language use says about breakups
By: Jackson Crews
Issue date: 11/21/07 Section: News
Breaking up is a bummer … and according to the research of one UA professor, language use is an indicator of a person's ability to cope with the change.
David Sbarra, an assistant professor of psychology, is working on an ongoing study that analyzes the ways in which young adults recover from the calamitous end of a romance.
"The main thrust of our research program in my lab is to understand how people deal with difficult life experiences and, in particular, how people recover from major upheavals in their life," Sbarra said.
The UA researcher and his colleagues in the Laboratory for Social Connectedness and Health recruited 166 subjects between the ages of 18-22 who had experienced a stressful breakup within the past six months.
They recorded interviews in which the subjects discussed their breakups and ran them through a computer program to evaluate the language use, counting the percentage of each subject's speech comprised of words from 11 separate categories including, "emotion words," "family words" and first person pronouns.
The data was then divided into four categories - women who were adjusting well, men adjusting well, women adjusting poorly and men adjusting poorly - a determination that was made based on the frequency with which a given subject experienced sleeplessness, dreams or intrusive thoughts stemming from the breakup.
Sbarra then looked for similarities in the word usage profiles of the subjects in each category and identified key differences in the words used by the subjects.
"We've tried to tease apart differences that characterize each group," he said.
For example, women who were adjusting poorly tended to use more third person references, like "him," "her" and "them," indicating that the subject is still preoccupied with another person.
Women who were adjusting well didn't use those words as frequently, and they also spoke with more certainty and referred to their social networks more often than women in the other category.
David Sbarra, an assistant professor of psychology, is working on an ongoing study that analyzes the ways in which young adults recover from the calamitous end of a romance.
"The main thrust of our research program in my lab is to understand how people deal with difficult life experiences and, in particular, how people recover from major upheavals in their life," Sbarra said.
The UA researcher and his colleagues in the Laboratory for Social Connectedness and Health recruited 166 subjects between the ages of 18-22 who had experienced a stressful breakup within the past six months.
They recorded interviews in which the subjects discussed their breakups and ran them through a computer program to evaluate the language use, counting the percentage of each subject's speech comprised of words from 11 separate categories including, "emotion words," "family words" and first person pronouns.
The data was then divided into four categories - women who were adjusting well, men adjusting well, women adjusting poorly and men adjusting poorly - a determination that was made based on the frequency with which a given subject experienced sleeplessness, dreams or intrusive thoughts stemming from the breakup.
Sbarra then looked for similarities in the word usage profiles of the subjects in each category and identified key differences in the words used by the subjects.
"We've tried to tease apart differences that characterize each group," he said.
For example, women who were adjusting poorly tended to use more third person references, like "him," "her" and "them," indicating that the subject is still preoccupied with another person.
Women who were adjusting well didn't use those words as frequently, and they also spoke with more certainty and referred to their social networks more often than women in the other category.
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AZfan
Jayson
posted 11/21/07 @ 12:44 AM PST
Interesting study. How did you find so many subjects? Did time have anything to do with whether the participants were coping well with the break up? e. (Continued…)
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