In 2022, two original studies were published on the topic of psychological text analysis. Their subject is the basic challenges of contemporary psychological-linguistic analysis – the issue of text type (text register) and Slavic languages and the issue of the influence of language and culture.
- Kučera, D., Haviger, J., & Havigerová, J. M. (2022). Personality and Word Use: Study on Czech Language and the Big Five. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09892-6
- The study is a follow-up to three published anglophone researches examining the relation between the use of linguistic categories and personality characteristics as outlined in the Big Five model, with the purpose of replicating these and elaborating for the Czech language. The comparative research study in Czech focuses on analysis of both grammatical and semantic variables in six types of text (written and oral), produced by N = 200 participants. Within the study, there were six confirmed relations, however, these appear only in certain types of text. The results show not only an essential role of the text register, but they also allow us to evaluate the universality of findings of studies in English in comparison with other, especially Slavic, languages.
- Kučera, D., & Mehl M. R. (2022). Beyond English: Considering Language and Culture in Psychological Text Analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 13:819543. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.819543
- The paper discusses the role of language and culture in the context of quantitative text analysis in psychological research. It reviews current automatic text analysis methods and approaches from the perspective of the unique challenges that can arise when going beyond the default English language. Special attention is paid to closed-vocabulary approaches and related methods (and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count in particular), both from the perspective of cross-cultural research where the analytic process inherently consists of comparing phenomena across cultures and languages and the perspective of generalizability beyond the language and the cultural focus of the original investigation. We highlight the need for a more universal and flexible theoretical and methodological grounding of current research, which includes the linguistic, cultural, and situational specifics of communication, and we provide suggestions for procedures that can be implemented in future studies and facilitate psychological text analysis across languages and cultures.