James W. Pennebaker Quotes

#1. After I published a paper showing that suicidal poets used pronouns differently from non-suicidal poets, a slightly inebriated poet threatened me with a butter knife at a party in my own home.

James W. Pennebaker

#2. The emotional findings, then, suggest that to gain the most benefit from writing about life's traumas, acknowledge the negative but celebrate the positive.

James W. Pennebaker

#3. If you are looking for a lover, a job, a new house, or a serial killer, Snoop is for you. It's great science and a fun read by a world-renowned personality researcher.

James W. Pennebaker

#4. I've since learned that when someone changes the conversational direction, it serves as a powerful marker of what is on his or her mind.

James W. Pennebaker

#5. As the number of studies increased, it became clear that writing was a far more powerful tool for healing than anyone had ever imagined.

James W. Pennebaker

#6. We need to take out the trash. As it happens, I have no intention of actually analyzing that data. Nor am I proposing to my son that we take a family outing to the trash bin. In many situations, people use the word we when they mean you. It serves as a polite form to order others around.

James W. Pennebaker

#7. Males categorize their worlds by counting, naming, and organizing the objects they confront. Women, in addition to personalizing their topics, talk in a more dynamic way, focusing on how their topics change. Discussions of change require more verbs.

James W. Pennebaker

#8. Human relationships are not rocket science
the are far, far more complicated

James W. Pennebaker

#9. One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status.

James W. Pennebaker

#10. Holding back our thoughts, feelings and behaviors can place people at risk for minor and major diseases.

James W. Pennebaker

#11. 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

James W. Pennebaker