Faculty
Social Science
Supervisor Name
Elizabeth P. Hayden
Keywords
psychology, developmental psychology, linguistic, negative affect, LIWC, automated transcription
Description
Abstract
Emotion is a crucial component of verbal communication that conveys messages besides the semantic meanings in speech. The phonological and locutionary cues reflect various emotional effects that are detectable for interpretation. Past research suggests that people who are physically and psychologically close to each other tend to express similar emotions through speech. This relationship has been scrutinized under empirical research for parent-infant relations. However, it is unclear whether the effect exists between parents and youths. This study analyzes recorded speeches of n = 8 parent-youth pairs from semi-structured Zoom interviews and compares them based on their similarities in negative affect. A language analytical software LIWC is used to extract target words from speeches based on predefined psychological construct parameters stored inside its “dictionary”. The results show a mixture of findings that do not indicate significant correlations among the linguistic parameters used to capture the negative affects between parents and youths. Language parameters emotional sadness and emotional anxiety in youth are the only measures found to significantly correlate (p < .01). Correlations between parent's and youths’ language parameters in personal pronouns, negative tones, and emotional anger have medium effect sizes (d <.5). The small sample size is thought to contribute to the low power in the study.
Acknowledgements
This work was made possible by the USRI program and the faculty of Social Science. I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Elizabeth P. Hayden, and the members of the LEAP Lab for their help and support.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Document Type
Poster
Included in
Parent-Youth Similarities on Negative Affect: Analyses of Language Parameters in Semi-Structured Interviews
Abstract
Emotion is a crucial component of verbal communication that conveys messages besides the semantic meanings in speech. The phonological and locutionary cues reflect various emotional effects that are detectable for interpretation. Past research suggests that people who are physically and psychologically close to each other tend to express similar emotions through speech. This relationship has been scrutinized under empirical research for parent-infant relations. However, it is unclear whether the effect exists between parents and youths. This study analyzes recorded speeches of n = 8 parent-youth pairs from semi-structured Zoom interviews and compares them based on their similarities in negative affect. A language analytical software LIWC is used to extract target words from speeches based on predefined psychological construct parameters stored inside its “dictionary”. The results show a mixture of findings that do not indicate significant correlations among the linguistic parameters used to capture the negative affects between parents and youths. Language parameters emotional sadness and emotional anxiety in youth are the only measures found to significantly correlate (p < .01). Correlations between parent's and youths’ language parameters in personal pronouns, negative tones, and emotional anger have medium effect sizes (d <.5). The small sample size is thought to contribute to the low power in the study.