Add thelocalreport.in As A Trusted Source
Is it possible to find out personality dysfunction From someone’s everyday use of words? My colleagues and I have done research that shows you can do this, and often sooner than you might expect.
Whether in a quick text message, a long email, a casual conversation with a friend, or an online comment, the words people choose quietly reveal their deep patterns of thinking, feeling, and relating to others.
Everyone has personality traits – habitual ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. When these patterns become rigid, intense, or disruptive, they can cause ongoing problems with emotions, sense of self, and relationships.
At the more severe end are personality disorders, where these patterns cause significant distress and impairment. Common personality disorders include narcissisticAntisocial, and borderline personality disorders.
But not everyone has the full-blown disorder. Personality functioning actually exists on a spectrum. we’re all a little narcissisticAt last.
People you meet – at work, while dating, or online – may exhibit mild difficulties, such as mood swings, negativity, rigid thinking, or darker traits such as manipulation and indifference. These patterns often change in the way people speak or write long before they emerge more obvious behavior,
There are some extreme examples. linguists Analysis of the personal letters of Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger – widely seen as a classic case of malignant narcissism – was found to have unusually high levels of self-centered language such as “I” and “I”. His emotional tone was also quite flat. Similarly, the letters of Dennis Rader, the BTK murderer (bind, torture, kill), displayed surprisingly grandiose, detached, and dominance-focused wording.
Psychologists have long known that certain linguistic habits reveal how people are functioning internally. For example, people experiencing distress consistently use more self-focused language and more negative emotion words. This is because they absorb too much and experience negative effects.
People with darker personality traits often use more hostile, negative, and disembodied language, including more profanity and anger words, such as “hate” or “crazy.” Additionally, they use less socially connected words like “we.”
In fact, these patterns are usually not created intentionally. They emerge naturally as language tracks attention, emotion, and thought. With computational text analysis, researchers can now analyze these subtle signals at scale and rapidly.
Our research findings
In four studies using computational text analysis – three of which constituted my PhD research – My colleagues and I found clear evidence that personality dysfunction leaves a detectable trace in everyday communication.
In a study of 530 people published in Journal of Personality DisordersWe analyzed essays written about people’s close relationships. We also collected data on their level of personality dysfunction. People with high personality disorder use language that has a sense of urgency and self-centeredness – “I need…”, “I have to…”, “I am…”.
It was expressed with reflective, past tense words. They had more negative, especially angry, emotional words, such as “furious” and “angry.” Additionally, they used less intimate or collaborative language such as “we”, “love” and “family”.
In another project published in Journal of Affective Disorders ReportsWe again analyzed written essays (530 people), as well as transcribed conversations from 64 romantic couples, including women with diagnosed personality disorders.
In both written and oral communication, people with more passive or disorganized personalities tend to use more negative emotion words – and a wider variety of them, too. Even during mundane conversations, his language had a heavy negative affect, indicating he was plagued by negative emotions.
A recently published study turned to online communication npj mental health researchWe analyzed about 67,000 reddit Posts from 992 people who described themselves as having a personality disorder. People who frequently engaged in self-harm used language that was markedly more negative and narrow-minded.
His posts included more self-centered language and more prohibitions – such as “can’t”. They used more words of sadness and anger and more profanity, while referring less to other people. His wording was also more absolute, reflecting all or nothing thinking, favoring words such as “always”, “never”, or “completely”.
About the author
Charlotte Entwistle is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in Psychology at the University of Liverpool. This article is republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons license. read the Original article here,
Together, these characteristics created a linguistic picture of emotional burden, negativity, withdrawal, and rigid thinking.
Finally, in an ongoing project analyzing more than 830,000 posts from the same 992 individuals with personality disorders, as well as 1.3 million posts from a general-population comparison group of 945 people, we examined how people express their self-beliefs (“I am…”, “I think…”, “I…”). Using an advanced self-confidence classification tool, we found that people with personality disorders share self-confidence more frequently in online discussion forums, and there are profound differences in their words.
Their self-beliefs were more negative, extreme, and disorder-focused, including phrases such as “my mental health”, “symptoms”, “diagnosis”, and “medication”. They also used more emotional descriptors such as “depressed”, “suicidal” and “nervous”. Many self-confident statements focus on pain and trauma – “abusive”, “abandoned”, “hurt”, “suffering”.
They also often made reference to childhood or important relationships (“mother”, “partner”, “relationship”). These patterns emerged in a wide range of discussion contexts, suggesting that deep struggles with identity can universally surface in language.
Why does it matter?
Understanding these linguistic patterns is not about diagnosing people from their texts. It’s about noticing changes in language that may provide benign signals. If someone’s messages suddenly become unusually urgent or excessive, emotionally negative, autocratic, inner-focused, and socially isolated, it may be a sign that they are struggling.
And in everyday situations – dating, friendships, online interactions – recognizing patterns of hostility, excessive negativity, and emotional and cognitive rigidity can help people identify early. red flagsThis is especially true for darker personality styles, like psychopathy or narcissism, For example, significantly high use of self-references (“I”, “me”), anger words (“hate”, “anger”), and profanity, coupled with a lack of vocabulary indicating social connection (“we”, “us”, “our”), may be important language patterns to look for,
But no single word or phrase reveals someone’s personality. People get angry, make jokes and take sarcasm. What really matters is the pattern over time; Emotional tone, subject matter, and recurring linguistic habits. Subtle linguistic traces can provide a window into someone’s emotional world, identity, thinking patterns, and relationships long before they speak openly about their difficulties.
Paying attention to these patterns can help us learn and understand others, support those who are struggling, and safely navigate our social lives online and offline with greater awareness.