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To what extent does the wording and syntactic form of people's writing reflect their personalities? Using a bottom-up stratified corpus comparison, rather than the top-down content analysis techniques that have been used before, we examine a corpus of e-mail messages elicited from individuals of known personality, as measured by the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire–Revised (S. Eysenck, Eysenck, & Barrett, 1985). This method allowed us to isolate linguistic features associated with different personality types, via both word and part-of-speech n-gram analysis. We investigated the extent to which extraversion is associated with linguistic features involving positivity, sociability, complexity, and implicitness and neuroticism is associated with negativity, self-concern, emphasis, and implicitness. Numerous interesting features were uncovered. For instance, higher levels of extraversion involved a preference for adjectives, whereas lower levels of neuroticism involved a preference for adverbs. However, neither positivity nor negativity was as prominent as expected, and there was little evidence for implicitness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Electronic media are pervasive in daily communication. But how well do personality ratings of short e-mail messages match the self-reports of the authors? Here we describe a small-scale preliminary study to test this. Working independently and under experimenter supervision, 30 judges each rated 18 short e-mail texts. These texts were written under experimental conditions by authors of known personality, who briefly described their recent activities, and were collected as part of a previous study, which demonstrated linguistic projection of personality. Even with minimal textual cues there is relatively high agreement for ratings of Extraversion, with lesser agreement for Psychoticism. However, agreement for Neuroticism ratings, especially between target and judges, appears to be further reduced by the environment. In addition to demonstrating agreement in asynchronous—rather than synchronous—computer-mediated communication, this study adopts the three-factor model of personality and uses exemplar-based and subjective measures of personality perception. We note the need for further research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]