Journal of Language and Social Psychology

This study tests the effects of political partisanship on voters’ perception and detection of deception. Based on social identity theory, in-group members should consider their politician’s message truthful while the opposing out-group would consider the message deceptive. Truth-default theory predicts that a salient in-group would be susceptible to deception from their in-group politician. In an experiment, partisan voters in the United States (N = 618) watched a news interview in which a politician was labeled Democratic or Republican. The politician either answered all the questions or deceptively evaded a question. Results indicated that the truth bias largely prevailed. Voters were more likely to be accurate in their detection when the politician answered and did not dodge. Truth-default theory appears robust in a political setting, as truth bias holds (as opposed to deception bias). Accuracy in detection also depends on group affiliation. In-groups are accurate when their politician answers, and inaccurate when he dodges. Out-groups are more accurate than in-groups when a politician dodges, but still exhibit truth bias.

This study examined the relationship between objective and subjective vitality, in-group language use, and life satisfaction among two groups of bilingual Hungarians adolescents living in Romania: a low objective vitality group from Cluj-Napoca/Kolozsvár, where Hungarians are the demographic minority, and a high objective vitality group from Sfântu Gheorghe/Sepsiszentgyörgy, where Hungarians are the demographic majority. Consistent with predictions, the high objective vitality group reported higher subjective Hungarian vitality, lower subjective Romanian vitality, more frequent use of the Hungarian language, and higher life satisfaction, compared with the low objective vitality group. The effects of objective vitality on language use were partially mediated by subjective Romanian (but not Hungarian) vitality. Conversely, the effects of objective vitality on life satisfaction were fully mediated by subjective Hungarian (but not Romanian) vitality.

We present a new composite indicator of depressed language and examine its utility to capture depressed affect among three nonclinical samples. Depressed individuals use more first person singular pronouns, more negatively valenced words, and fewer positively valenced words. Building on this previous research, we hypothesize that individuals under conditions of chronic or acute stress, a psychological state likely to evoke depressed affect, will evidence increased use of depressed language when compared with those not under stress. Across three studies examining different populations (university faculty, undergraduate college women, and gay men) using multiple markers of stress (perceived stress, stress appraisals, blood pressure), we find that depressed language is consistently positively associated with both acute and chronic stress. Our findings suggest that this measure of depressed language may serve as a useful tool for identifying depressed affect for both practitioners and researchers.

The rationale of this study is that by stressing the argumentative force of the message, and thus orientating its processing, scalar adverbs are likely to be processed as an attempt to influence the decision making as regards the message advocacy and consequently trigger some aversive reactions in the recipients. To support this claim, an experiment is conducted in a context of a (campus) health promotion program dealing with HIV infection. It shows that the introduction of such adverbs in an epidemiological information report increases the cognitive and affective outcomes dealing with psychological reactance, and decreases the message acceptability and the behavioral intentions. It also shows that for the affective component of psychological reactance and message acceptability, these effects occur especially when the source of the message is perceived as authoritative. The persuasiveness of such linguistic items in the context of health communication is addressed in the conclusion of the study.

According to common belief, friends communicate more accurately and efficiently than strangers, because they can use uniquely shared knowledge and common knowledge to explain things to each other, while strangers are restricted to common knowledge. To test this belief, we asked friends and strangers to play, via e-mail and face-to-face, the word-description game Taboo, in which objects need to be described without using certain “taboo” words. When descriptions were sent via e-mail, there was no difference in accuracy (number of correct answers) nor in efficiency (number of words per correct answer) between friends and strangers. When descriptions were given face-to-face, friends were more accurate than strangers, but not more efficient (number of seconds and words per correct answer). Shared knowledge did not predict accuracy or efficiency. Hence, our findings do not support the idea that friends only need a few words to understand each other.