Presidential parlance

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the Chronicle of Higher Education

Friday, April 28, 2006

A glance at the online edition of the Journal of Research in Personality:
Presidential parlance

 In the 2004 presidential campaign, President Bush was often described as
coming across like a cowboy, while his challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry, was
labeled a flip-flopper. An analysis of the candidates' linguistic styles,
however, shows the president spoke more like an older person, while
Senator Kerry spoke like a depressed person, says Richard B. Slatcher, a
doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.  Aided by three
other researchers, Mr. Slatcher used a computerized text-analysis program
to measure how the candidates for president and vice president differed in
the linguistic patterns associated with cognitive complexity, femininity,
depression, age, presidentiality, and honesty.

Mr. Slatcher says the president's language was most like that of an older
person, because, as people do when they age, he used fewer first-person
singular words, more positive-emotion words, and had "a greater focus on
the future." Vice President Dick Cheney's language was found to be most
cognitively complex, the least feminine, and the most "presidential" among
the candidates. Presidential language, notes the author, was marked by
high levels of articles, prepositions, positive emotions, and words more
than six letters long.

Mr. Kerry's style was more like someone suffering from depression, Mr.
Slatcher says, because of his high use of first-person singular words,
physical words like "ache," and negative-emotion words like "hate," along
with low use of positive-emotion words, like "happy." His running mate,
Sen. John Edwards, came across as more feminine than the others in
speaking style because his language was the most "warm and personal,"
writes the author. Mr. Slatcher also set out to determine whether opinion
polls affect "the fundamental ways in which politicians speak." The only
candidate to show any significant pattern was Mr. Edwards. As the author
describes it, "the better the Kerry/Edwards ticket was doing in the polls,
the more honest and cognitively complex Edwards' language was."

The article, "Winning Words: Individual Differences in Linguistic Style
Among U.S. Presidential and Vice-Presidential Candidates," is available to
subscribers or for purchase through ScienceDirect.

http://chronicle.com/daily/2006/04/2006042801j.htm