A study of the language people use when going through a fracture has shown that marks of an impending fracture are visible three months before the fractures occur.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin looked at 1,027,541 posts from 6,803 Reddit users. The users were chosen specifically because they posted to the r / BreakUps subreddit. No, before you think it, the indication that a breakup was coming was not that they were posting to this particular forum – but the fact that they had posted there, as well as many other parts of Reddit, gave researchers the opportunity to see how their breakup affected their language use.
The team, which published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at posts before, during, and after the breakup over two years of posts. They found that language markers indicating a break started three months in advance, and users did not return to their baseline (on average) about six months after the event.
“Signs included an increase in I words, we words, and cognitive processing words (indicative of depression, collective focus, and the meaning-making process, respectively),” the team wrote in the study, “and a decrease in analytic thinking. personal and informal language). “
For example, in the study example below, the bold words show signs of cognitive processing, as well as an abundance of “I” words.
“Im undecided whether or not to share my story. I need some help out because I to feel lost but my story is long and not sure if it’s worth sharing. ”
These subtle changes in pronoun usage and other language changes were observed not only when the users talked about their relationships, but also when they talked about other topics.
“It seems that even before people are aware that a breakup is going to happen, it starts to affect their lives,” psychology doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author Sarah Seraj told Science Daily. “We don’t really notice how often we use prepositions, articles or pronouns, but these function words change in a way when you go through a personal upheaval that can tell us a lot about our emotional and psychological state.”
The perceived language changes peaked in the week of the breakup and generally returned to normal 6 months after the relationship ended. However, those who posted about their breakup for longer periods and returned to r / BreakUps to talk about their breakup story were “less well-adjusted one year after their breakup compared to short-term posters.” language other than their usual baseline.