Tentative Language Research Articles

The role of originality, distancing, and tentative language in effective cognitive reappraisal among adolescents

Recent evidence from studies of adolescents suggests that the association between cognitive reappraisal, a well-studied emotion regulation strategy, and well-being may be contingent upon the successfulness of reappraisal attempts. To better determine how adolescents can generate more perceived effective reappraisals, the current study sought to evaluate the originality and linguistic elements of specific reappraisals, including their collective and independent associations with rated regulatory efficacy. We had two goals: 1) assess the relative association between originality, linguistic distancing, and tentative language and rated reappraisal efficacy; 2) evaluate the association between these specific reappraisal components and regulatory efficacy above and beyond general emotion regulation knowledge. Participants (n = 711; 50.8% female, 49.2% male; 15–17 years of age, mean 15.82, SD = 0.74) completed a measure of emotion regulation knowledge and a measure of creative cognitive reappraisal. Above and beyond the variance accounted for by emotion regulation knowledge scores, both more original reappraisals and more temporally distanced language were associated with higher levels of perceived effectiveness. The use of social distancing and tentative language were negatively associated with rated reappraisal efficacy. Originality, distancing, and tentativeness were simultaneously significant, suggesting that they account for unique variance in reappraisal effectiveness.

The Effect of Monetary Incentives on Health Care Social Media Content: Study Based on Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis.

While there is high-quality online health information, a lot of recent work has unfortunately highlighted significant issues with the health content on social media platforms (eg, fake news and misinformation), the consequences of which are severe in health care. One solution is to investigate methods that encourage users to post high-quality content. Incentives have been shown to work in many domains, but until recently, there was no method to provide financial incentives easily on social media for users to generate high-quality content. This study investigates the following question: What effect does the provision of incentives have on the creation of social media health care content? We analyzed 8328 health-related posts from an incentive-based platform (Steemit) and 1682 health-related posts from a traditional platform (Reddit). Using topic modeling and sentiment analysis-based methods in machine learning, we analyzed these posts across the following 3 dimensions: (1) emotion and language style using the IBM Watson Tone Analyzer service, (2) topic similarity and difference from contrastive topic modeling, and (3) the extent to which posts resemble clickbait. We also conducted a survey using 276 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users and asked them to score the quality of Steemit and Reddit posts. Using the Watson Tone Analyzer in a sample of 2000 posts from Steemit and Reddit, we found that more than double the number of Steemit posts had a confident language style compared with Reddit posts (77 vs 30). Moreover, 50% more Steemit posts had analytical content and 33% less Steemit posts had a tentative language style compared with Reddit posts (619 vs 430 and 416 vs 627, respectively). Furthermore, more than double the number of Steemit posts were considered joyful compared with Reddit posts (435 vs 200), whereas negative posts (eg, sadness, fear, and anger) were 33% less on Steemit than on Reddit (384 vs 569). Contrastive topic discovery showed that only 20% (2/10) of topics were common, and Steemit had more unique topics than Reddit (5 vs 3). Qualitatively, Steemit topics were more informational, while Reddit topics involved discussions, which may explain some of the quantitative differences. Manual labeling marked more Steemit headlines as clickbait than Reddit headlines (66 vs 26), and machine learning model labeling consistently identified a higher percentage of Steemit headlines as clickbait than Reddit headlines. In the survey, MTurk users said that at least 57% of Steemit posts had better quality than Reddit posts, and they were at least 52% more likely to like and comment on Steemit posts than Reddit posts. It is becoming increasingly important to ensure high-quality health content on social media; therefore, incentive-based social media could be important in the design of next-generation social platforms for health information.

Head versus heart: social media reveals differential language of loneliness from depression

We study the language differentially associated with loneliness and depression using 3.4-million Facebook posts from 2986 individuals, and uncover the statistical associations of survey-based depression and loneliness with both dictionary-based (Linguistic Inquiry Word Count 2015) and open-vocabulary linguistic features (words, phrases, and topics). Loneliness and depression were found to have highly overlapping language profiles, including sickness, pain, and negative emotions as (cross-sectional) risk factors, and social relationships and activities as protective factors. Compared to depression, the language associated with loneliness reflects a stronger cognitive focus, including more references to cognitive processes (i.e., differentiation and tentative language, thoughts, and the observation of irregularities), and cognitive activities like reading and writing. As might be expected, less lonely users were more likely to reference social relationships (e.g., friends and family, romantic relationships), and use first-person plural pronouns. Our findings suggest that the mechanisms of loneliness include self-oriented cognitive activities (i.e., reading) and an overattention to the interpretation of information in the environment. These data-driven ecological findings suggest interventions for loneliness that target maladaptive social cognitions (e.g., through reframing the perception of social environments), strengthen social relationships, and treat other affective distress (i.e., depression).

Exploring Agency in Capstone Design Problem Framing

<strong>Background:</strong> Because of prior experience solving well-structured problems that have single, correct answers, students often struggle to direct their own design work and may not understand the need to frame ill-structured design problems. <strong>Purpose: </strong>Framing agency—defined as making decisions that are consequential to framing design problems and learning through this process—sheds light on students’ treatment of design problems; by framing, we mean the various actions designers take to understand, define, and bound the problem. Using the construct framing agency, we sought to characterize design team discourse to detect whether students treated design problems as ill- or well-structured and examine the consequences of this treatment. <strong>Method: </strong>Data were collected through extended participant observation of a capstone design course in a biomedical engineering program at a large research university. Data included audio and video records of design team meetings over the course of framing and solving industry-sponsored problems. For this paper, we analyzed three cases using sociolinguistic content analysis to characterize framing agency and compared the cases to illuminate the nuances of framing agency. <strong>Results: </strong>All teams faced impasses; one team navigated the impasse by framing the problem, whereas the others treated the problem as given. We identified markers of agency in students’ discourse, including tentative language, personal pronouns, and sharing ownership. <strong>Conclusions:</strong> Framing agency clarifies the kinds of learning experiences students need in order to overcome past experiences dominated by solving archetypical well-structured problems with predetermined solutions.

The impact of task description linguistic style on task performance: a text mining of crowdsourcing contests

PurposeExisting studies on the relationship between task description and task performance are insufficient, with many studies considering description length rather than content to measure quality or only evaluating a single aspect of task performance. To address this gap, this study analyzes the linguistic styles of task descriptions from 2,545 tasks on the Taskcn.com crowdsourcing platform.Design/methodology/approachAn empirical analysis was completed for task description language styles and task performance. The paper used text mining tool Simplified Chinese Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to extract eight linguistic styles, namely readability, self-distancing, cognitive complexity, causality, tentative language, humanizing personal details, normative information and language intensity. And it tests the relationship between the eight language styles and task performance.FindingsThe study found that more cognitive complexity markers, tentative language, humanized details and normative information increase the quantity of submissions for a task. In addition, more humanized details and normative information in a task description improves the quality of task. Conversely, the inclusion of more causal relationships in a task description reduces the quantity of submissions. Poorer readability of the task description, less self-estrangement and higher language intensity reduces the quality of the task.Originality/valueThis study first reveals the importance of the linguistic styles used in task descriptions and provides a reference for how to attract more task solvers and achieve higher quality task performance by improving task descriptions. The research also enriches existing knowledge on the impact of linguistic styles and the applications of text mining.

An exploratory study of COVID-19 misinformation on Twitter

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of misinformation on Twitter around the topic of COVID-19 in order to gain early insights. We have collected all tweets mentioned in the verdicts of fact-checked claims related to COVID-19 by over 92 professional fact-checking organisations between January and mid-July 2020 and share this corpus with the community. This resulted in 1500 tweets relating to 1274 false and 226 partially false claims, respectively. Exploratory analysis of author accounts revealed that the verified twitter handle(including Organisation/celebrity) are also involved in either creating(new tweets) or spreading(retweet) the misinformation. Additionally, we found that false claims propagate faster than partially false claims. Compare to a background corpus of COVID-19 tweets, tweets with misinformation are more often concerned with discrediting other information on social media. Authors use less tentative language and appear to be more driven by concerns of potential harm to others. Our results enable us to suggest gaps in the current scientific coverage of the topic as well as propose actions for authorities and social media users to counter misinformation.

Examining the language demands of informed consent documents in patient recruitment to cancer trials using tools from corpus and computational linguistics

Obtaining informed consent (IC) is an ethical imperative, signifying participants’ understanding of the conditions and implications of research participation. One setting where the stakes for understanding are high is randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which test the effectiveness and safety of medical interventions. However, the use of legalese and medicalese in ethical forms coupled with the need to explain RCT-related concepts (e.g. randomization) can increase patients’ cognitive load when reading text. There is a need to systematically examine the language demands of IC documents, including whether the processes intended to safeguard patients by providing clear information might do the opposite through complex, inaccessible language. Therefore, the goal of this study is to build an open-access corpus of patient information sheets (PIS) and consent forms (CF) and analyze each genre using an interdisciplinary approach to capture multidimensional measures of language quality beyond traditional readability measures. A search of publicly-available online IC documents for UK-based cancer RCTs (2000-17) yielded corpora of 27 PIS and 23 CF. Textual analysis using the computational tool, Coh-Metrix, revealed different linguistic dimensions relating to the complexity of IC documents, particularly low word concreteness for PIS and low referential and deep cohesion for CF, although both had high narrativity. Key part-of-speech analyses using Wmatrix corpus software revealed a contrast between the overrepresentation of the pronoun ‘you’ plus modal verbs in PIS and ‘I’ in CF, exposing the contradiction inherent in conveying uncertainty to patients using tentative language in PIS while making them affirm certainty in their understanding in CF.

From Swallowing to Savoring Emotions

Abstract. This article presents a Therapeutic Assessment case study of a 48-year-old Catholic nun who was evaluated for concerns related to recurrent depression, difficulty relating to others, trouble following through on tasks, and lack of self-care. Maria was given the Rorschach, MMPI-2-RF, Wartegg Drawing Completion Test, and Thurston Cradock Test of Shame (TCTS). Testing results suggested depression, problems regulating emotion, incongruence between external presentation and internal state, and impaired functional intelligence when negative emotions are triggered. Maria’s TCTS protocol indicated a tendency to deflate in the presence of shame or criticism. She used tentative language around emotion, did not access support, and struggled to resolve emotionally charged situations. The TCTS results appeared to access and explain Maria’s core difficulties. TCTS Cards 6 and 8 were selected for an assessment intervention session (AIS) designed to help Maria understand what she does with negative feelings. Maria was asked to tell a story focusing on the main character. Through half-steps and affective scaffolding, Maria identified how she “swallows” her negative feelings and “isolates” when emotions are strong. The authors discuss how the AIS helped Maria access her split-off affect, and understand its relation to her symptoms, poor self-care, impaired follow-through, and relational difficulties.

Examining Engagement in the Discussion Section of Marketing Research Articles

Studies have shown that the use of Engagement resources is a subtle task for research article writers, making the appropriate use of such resources a complex topic for less experienced writers. For this reason, the present study examined expert writers' ways of positioning their work in marketing research articles on Discussion sections to highlight how Engagement resources can be managed successfully. Drawing on the Engagement subsystem of the Appraisal Framework nine Discussion sections were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively using the UAM corpus tool. The analysis revealed that the Discussion sections were highly heteroglossic, and had contractive resources twice as much as expansive ones, suggesting that marketing academics are more concerned with establishing their credibility as knowers in the field than construing a reader-friendly text. It is also observed that academics in the marketing field tend to focus more on proclaiming their findings in the Discussion section while at the same time mitigating the communicative force of their argument by using tentative language, creating a subtle balance between claim-making and acceptance of potentially differing views. The findings of the present study can offer insights for academic writing materials' developers, novice researchers, and academic writing instructors.

TENTATIVE LANGUAGE IN MIXED-GENDER CONVERSATIONS OF JORDANIANS: THE INFLUENCE OF GENDER AND SOCIAL STATUS

Purpose of Study: This paper evaluated the validity of self-categorization theory (Turner, 1987; Turner &amp; Reynolds, 2011) in predicting the relationship between tentative language use and the prominent power of the speaker’s gender and social status in Jordanian society. Methodology: Eighteen adult Jordanian dyads participated in dyadic conversations. Each dyad consisted of high-status females and low-status males. Before recording their mixed-gender conversations, dyad’s gender; status and national identity were primed one at a time using Palomares’ manipulation method (2004, 2008). One group of dyads read a passage about the patriarchal nature of Arab society, another dyadic group read a passage about the importance of education in obtaining high-level jobs, and a third group read a passage about Jordanians’ patriotism. Results: Results showed that Jordanian high-status women tend to use more tentative language than Jordanian low-status men within and across the three primed contexts: gender-salient, status-salient and national- identity-salient contexts. Findings are inconsistent with the prediction of the self-categorization theory. The discrepancies between these findings and the outcomes of the Western research were ascribed to the patriarchic and gender-segregated nature of Jordanian society. Implications: This paper concluded that sociolinguistic practices are not universal. Research on language and gender should take socio-cultural peculiarities into account to reach a comprehensive view of how social power is communicated through language. Novelty/Originality of this study: This study emphasizes the role of socio-cultural practices in determining the relationship between speech style and the prominent power of the speaker's gender and social status. In Arab Jordanian society, tentative language is mainly gender-based language; less influenced by social identities other than gender.

Lakoff and Women’s Language

In Language and Woman’s Place (1973), Robin T. Lakoff argues that women’s subordinate position in society is manifested in and maintained by their tentative speech style. Since the publication of the study, this claim has achieved great attention in the field of language and gender, and various scholars have examined the features of Lakoff’s ‘women’s language’ empirically. This article creates a critical overview of four studies investigating specific features of tentative language, primarily tag questions, and discusses to what extent their findings support Lakoff’s thesis. While all the studies find that women employ more tentative features than men, they also observe that tentative language serves facilitative functions in interaction. Thus, tentative language cannot be understood exclusively as a deficient contrast to assertive language. A nuanced understanding of tentative language requires a functional perspective that recognizes the efficient social functions of the speech style.

The indexical nature of classroom discourse: the role of technology integration

ABSTRACTThis study explored how fifth-grade teachers and their students use indexical expressions (i.e. verbal expressions to convey the degree of certainty or tentativeness) as being indicative of dialogism in whole-class discussions in four elementary classes. Half of the classes received instruction on geographic information system (GIS)-related topics by way of technology integration and inquiry-based instruction, whereas the other half received typical social-studies lessons involving paper maps, serving as a baseline group. Technology integration was associated with relatively more use of indexical expressions, both boosters (to convey certainty) and hedges (to denote tentativeness), by teachers and their students and higher impact of student language on teacher language in the degree of absoluteness and tentativeness. Moreover, whereas the network of indexical expressions in the technology-integrated classes included a reciprocal impact between teachers and students and among students, the network in the baseline classes was limited to student-student exchanges alone. These findings suggest that technology integration in inquiry lessons tends to encourage the use of tentative and confirmatory language that aligns with the nature of the discipline.

The Unheard Female Voice

The Unheard Female Voice

Stereotype Threat in Male Nurse-Patient Interactions.

Stereotype threat describes the apprehension individuals experience from the prospect of confirming negative self-relevant stereotypes. Due to their minority status, male nurses are believed to be susceptible to stereotype threat effects in the field of nursing. One hundred eighty-three male nursing students were randomly assigned to one of three evaluative frames (patient management, empathy, or control) and tasked with completing an online patient simulation experiment. With empathy serving as a form of stereotype threat, participant responses were analyzed for tentative language use. An interaction effect (patient gender × frame) was observed, where participants were most tentative when the simulation involved a male patient in the empathy frame. Findings from the study offer encouragement as the communicative abilities of participants were not consistently influenced under conditions of stereotype threat. This provides support for the need to forearm male nurses against the pernicious effects of gender-based stereotypes. [J Nurs Educ. 2018;57(10):614-619.].

Tentative Language Is Kind of Complicated, Isn’t It?

Some sociolinguists, notably Robin Lakoff, have argued that tentative language is typical of female speakers. However, other studies indicate that gender may not be the only independent variable affecting the use of tentative language. This overview examines the claim that women’s speech is inherently less assertive by critically evaluating the methods and findings of four studies of gender-related use of tentative language. The alternative independent variables that are considered are the gender of the addressee, group composition, gender salience, and topic. The dependent variables vary from study to study, but all fall under the label “tentative language,” such as hedging and tag questions. It is concluded that while there is some evidence the speaker’s gender affects the use of tentative language, the aforementioned variables are likely to have an effect as well. Therefore, this overview supports the theory that considering tentative language typical of women’s speech is a simplified interpretation.

The first advertisement for D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature

AFTER D. H. Lawrence’s American publisher Thomas Seltzer obtained a complete manuscript of Studies in Classic American Literature in June 1922, he accepted it for publication and decided to issue it ‘early in the fall’, that is, around the same time he planned to publish Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious. In their introduction to the Cambridge edition of Studies in Classic American Literature, the editors present a publication history of the book. Explaining Seltzer’s marketing plans, they observe, ‘He even seems to have advertised the book’s forthcoming appearance.’ In a footnote to this sentence, the editors give a reason for their tentative language, quoting a 6 November 1922 letter from Seltzer to Lawrence that says ‘the book has already been announced’ but noting, ‘No copy of any advertisement has, however, been traced.’1 The advertisement Seltzer mentions in the 6 November 1922 letter to Lawrence appeared in the front matter to the October 1922 issue of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts, a modernist monthly edited and published by Harold Loeb, who is best known as the real-life inspiration for Robert Cohn in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The announcement for Studies in Classic American Literature appears directly after one for Fantasia of the Unconscious. Its text reads: Contains long essays on Walt Whitman and Hawthorne and studies of Herman Melville, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Henry Dana and other American writers. It is interesting to note that Lawrence rediscovered Herman Melville long before the boom in South Sea Travel books made Melville a writer of contemporary popularity.2

Psicoterapia Experiencial Orientada al Focusing: una visión general

La psicoterapia experiencial y el focusing fue desarrollada por Eugene Gendlin en Estados Unidos, mientras era parte del equipo de investigación de Carl Rogers. La psicoterapia experiencial es un desarrollo del enfoque centrado en la persona que surge de la investigación en psicoterapia, observando a personas cuyos procesos fueron exitosos. En estas investigaciones, se observó que las personas con mayores avances en sus terapias tenían cierta particularidad en cómo expresaban sus vivencias. Esto se manifestaba en que hablaban con un lenguaje tentativo, más lento y chequeaban con algo interno lo que iban expresando. Gendlin desarrolla una filosofía, una teoría experiencial y el focusing como herramienta aplicada a la psicoterapia. En la presente revisión teórica se realizará una descripción de los fundamentos básicos de la psicoterapia experiencial orientada al focusing, sus influencias, el focusing como método y técnica, y sus aplicaciones.

Critical Overview: Gender and Tentative Language

This article is concerned with the relationship between tentative language and gender. In 1975, linguist Robin Lakoff hypothesized that women tended to use unassertive speech forms because of their inferior and powerless position in society. On the basis of these assertions by Lakoff, this article seeks to create a critical overview of various studies that have consulted the issue of women’s use of tentative language. Specifically, the article is concerned with hedging, investigating whether women have been found to use this linguistic device more often than men. The article consults five different studies on gender and tentative language, discusses the strengths and weaknesses of these studies, and finally, the article discusses whether the studies overall show any significant differences in the way men and women use unassertive speech forms.

Novel Values

Novel Values

Onward Ho! Studying Place Emotions, Language Style, and Social Tendencies in Travel Blogs

A narrative analysis of the blog posts from Asian countries taken from travelblog.org was conducted in January 2017 in order understand the travel bloggers' emotional experiences, language style, and social tendencies. Tone Analyzer from IBM was used to study emotional dimensions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, and sadness) ; language style dimensions - analytical, confident, tentative ; and social tendency dimensions - openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional range. The results showed sadness and joy being the predominant emotions expressed in the travel blogs that were studied. Tourists are exposed to both the best and worst things in the places of travel, and so probably, they experience joy and sadness together. Anger was the least expressed emotion. Emotional range topped among social tendencies of bloggers, with a tentative language style being utilized across travel accounts in Asia.