The Secret Life of Pronouns (8 page)

The personality research is at odds with the bleak stereotypes of older people as being lonely, selfish, rigid, and bitter. Some of the more promising research that combats these stereotypes is being conducted by Laura Carstensen and her colleagues at Stanford University. She finds that as people age, emotion becomes a more important part of life. With greater attention to emotional states, people learn to regulate their emotions more effectively, resulting in greater happiness and fewer negative feelings. Although people over the age of seventy tend to have fewer friends, their social networks become stronger.

A fitting observation by the main character, Lloyd, in the Farrelly brothers’ classic film
Dumb and Dumber
says it all. After asking an elderly woman to guard his possessions for a few minutes, Lloyd remarks, “Thanks. Hey, I guess they’re right. Senior citizens, although slow and dangerous behind the wheel, can still serve a purpose. I’ll be right back. Don’t you go dying on me!” The elderly woman cheerfully snatches everything Lloyd owns.

How does language change as people age? We have tested this in several ways. The first was to go back to the giant blog project where we analyzed the collected posts of over nineteen thousand bloggers. The blog site that we “harvested” in 2004 was made up of people who were, on average, about twenty years old. We split the sample into three age groups: adolescent (ages thirteen to seventeen), young adult (ages twenty-three to twenty-seven), and adult (ages thirty-three to forty-seven). Despite the restricted age range, the three groups used emotion and function words very differently. Teens used personal pronouns (
I
,
you
), short words, and auxiliary verbs at very high rates. The older the people became, the more they used bigger words, prepositions, and articles.

We also conducted a systematic analysis on people who took part in one of several dozen expressive writing studies. As you recall from the first chapter, I’ve long been involved in studies where we ask people to write about deeply personal and oftentimes traumatic experiences. Over the years, researchers from labs around the world have sent me the writing samples from studies they have conducted. For the aging project, I teamed up with Lori Stone Handelman, a brilliant graduate student who later became a highly respected book editor in New York. Lori and I analyzed data from over 3,200 people who participated in one of 45 writing studies from 17 different universities. Although the average person in the studies was about twenty-four years old, the ages ranged from eight to eighty years old.

As you might imagine, people wrote about a wide array of topics—from sexual abuse and drug addiction to the death of a pet to not making the high school football team or cheerleading squad. Many of the essays were heartbreaking. For most, there was the sense that people put their soul into writing their stories.

Computer analyses of the texts yielded large and sometimes unexpected findings. When writing about emotional topics, the younger and older participants used strikingly different words.

Perhaps more impressive was the emotional tone of the young versus older writers. Consistent with the survey research, older people used more positive emotion words and younger people expressed more negative feelings. The differences became apparent by the age of forty but exploded among the oldest age group.

What makes these findings so intriguing is that all people were asked to write about some of the most troubling experiences of their entire lives. Younger people could dredge up an impressive number of dark words to express their pain. As writers got older and older, their negative emotion vocabulary diminished and their positive emotion word count skyrocketed. As you can see on the next page, the very youngest writer in this sample, who was eight years old, had a very different approach to the subject of his emotional story (Randy) than the oldest participant, who was dealing with cancer:

Eight-year old elementary school student:
My enemy is Randy he makes me mad. Outside he calls me names, he ignores me, he does not stop bothering me, so I call him names when he starts. He does not stop so I start and get him back he makes me mad so I make him mad so I try to ignore him but he keeps making me mad … My mom says he is a bad influence.

Eighty-year old retiree.
I am 80 years old, but I try to keep busy and go about life as though there is no ending. Sure I am not as fast or move as quick as I once did, but I do not feel it was the fault of the cancer and I try to do the best I can with what I’ve got. When negative thoughts try to creep in my thoughts I immediately try to replace them with positive thoughts of how lucky I am to still be here. For the 38 treatments I drove the car myself every morning alone and had a good chance of meditation and this is where I found my positive attitude from seeing the beauty of nature and changing of the seasons.

Would you rather be eighty years old or eight? After reading these essays, the answer is not as simple as you might have thought. You get a greater appreciation of Laura Carstensen’s argument that the older we get, the better we are able to regulate our emotions. At the same time, aging allows us to look at the world in a more detached way.

One concern that many life-span scientists have is that differences in language between, say, a group of seventy-year-olds and a group of forty-year-olds may not reflect the effects of age. Rather, all the seventy-year-olds have gone through shared life experiences that the forty-year-olds haven’t. For example, in some of the studies that were run in the early 1990s, all those who were in their seventies had grown up without television and had lived through World War II. Those in their forties generally had lived with television all their lives and were part of the baby boom generation. Maybe seventy-year-olds are just happy because they didn’t have television growing up. Probably not, however.

One way that we bypassed this problem was to study the collected works of ten novelists, poets, and playwrights over the last four centuries who wrote extensively over the course of their lives. With this group of authors, we simply tracked their language use as they got older. Overall, eight of the ten authors showed the same age-related language patterns that we found in our other projects (the two exceptions were Louisa May Alcott and Charles Dickens).

A nice example is from the writings of the British novelist Jane Austen. Austen was born in 1775 and died at the age of forty-two. Her first work was written when she was twelve and she continued writing until her death. Her original manuscripts, including short novels, letters, and poems, were later published in a book called
Juvenilia
; her last book,
Sanditon
, was not quite finished when she died. Compare the first paragraphs of her first and last novels.

Jack and Alice: A Novel
(from
Juvenilia
)

Mr Johnson was once upon a time about 53; in a twelve-month afterwards he was 54, which so much delighted him that he was determined to celebrate his next Birth day by giving a Masquerade to his Children and Friends. Accordingly on the Day he attained his 55th year tickets were dispatched to all his Neighbours to that purpose. His acquaintance indeed in that part of the World were not very numerous as they consisted only of Lady Williams, Mr and Mrs Jones, Charles Adams and the 3 Miss Simpsons, who composed the neighbourhood of Pammydiddle and formed the Masquerade.

Sanditon

A Gentleman & Lady travelling from Tunbridge towards that part of the Sussex Coast which lies between Hastings & E. Bourne, being induced by Business to quit the high road, & attempt a very rough Lane, were overturned in toiling up its long ascent half rock, half sand. - - - The accident happened just beyond the only Gentleman’s House near the Lane - - - a House, which their Driver on being first required to take that direction, had conceived to be necessarily their object, & had with most unwilling Looks been constrained to pass by.

Even at the age of twelve (and she may have been as old as fifteen), Austen was precocious. Nevertheless, the writing samples betray clues of the author’s age. In
Sanditon
, Austen uses far more prepositions, nouns, and cognitive words (e.g.,
induced
,
quit
,
overturned
,
constrained
). The young Austen uses more personal pronouns and references to time (e.g.,
time
,
month
,
day
). Although the young Austen uses an inordinate number of large words for a person of any age, it’s clear that her thinking is far less complex than the older Austen’s.

Austen’s age-related language changes map those of the poets Wordsworth, Yeats, Robert Graves, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, as well as fellow novelist George Eliot and playwright Joanna Baillie. Shakespeare’s profile is a bit complicated but even he shows the same general patterns.

One final note of interest about the language of age and sex: You may have noticed that older people often use function words like men and younger people tend to use them like women. This isn’t some kind of statistical fluke. These patterns hold up across cultures, languages, and centuries. Interestingly, it’s not that women start to talk like men and men just stay the same. Rather, men and women usually have parallel changes. For example, at ages eight to fourteen, about 19 percent of girls’ words are pronouns, compared with 17 percent for boys. By the time they reach seventy, the rates drop to 15 percent for women and 12 percent for men.

We will return to the possible reasons for these patterns after discussing social class differences, which, as you will see, overlap with some sex and age effects.

SOCIAL CLASS AND LANGUAGE

From the very beginning of my education, I was always taught that in the United States we do not have social classes. England and India did, of course. But not the U.S. In graduate school in social psychology, there were often discussions of racial differences and inequality in the United States but never anything about social class. That’s right, the U.S. didn’t have social classes. By the time I was a young faculty member studying physical health, most conferences I attended in the U.S. would include presentations demonstrating large racial differences in blood pressure and other diseases, smoking and obesity and other health behaviors, and life expectancy. Nothing about social class. Well, you know why.

By the early 1990s, I was attending more and more international conferences. If the speakers were from Europe, their graphs and tables always included class information but not race. The Americans were just the opposite. By the mid-1990s, however, something shifted. Statisticians started remarking that the effects of social class in the United States were often stronger than the effects of race. Indeed, in the last decade, a dizzying number of studies have shown powerful effects of class on smoking, drinking, depression, obesity, and every physical and mental health problem you can imagine.

Social class is generally measured by years of education that people have completed and their yearly income. You might think that lower social class is associated with health problems because poorer people don’t have access to health care. In fact, the exact same social class effects are found in Sweden and other countries where health care is universal. Social class is linked to almost everything we do—the foods we buy, the movies we see, the people we vote for, and the ways we raise our children. And, predictably, the ways we use function words.

Over the last forty years, a smattering of studies have pointed to social class differences in language development, vocabulary, and even language patterns in the home. None to my knowledge have examined language differences among large samples of adults. Recently, my colleagues David Beaver, a linguist, and Gary Lavergne, a researcher in the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) Office of Admissions, and I teamed up to study the admissions essays that high school students write in order to gain access to college. UT-Austin is a selective undergraduate institution and recruits about seven thousand top students each year. In addition to writing two essays, applicants must also complete a large number of surveys in order to be considered for admission. Among other things, students are asked to supply information about their families’ social class—including education of parents and estimated parental income. Examining the data for four consecutive years allowed us to study the social class–language connection with over twenty-five thousand students.

The table on the next page should be somewhat familiar. Students coming from higher social classes tended to use bigger words, more articles (and nouns), and more prepositions. Students from lower social classes tended to be more personal in their admissions essays, using more pronouns, auxiliary verbs, present-tense verbs, and cognitive mechanism words (many of which are associated with hedges).