Personality and Priming: Trait anxiety and syntactic alignment

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Personality and PrimingTrait anxiety and
syntactic alignment

• Alastair Gill, Annabel Harrison Jon Oberlander
• University of Edinburgh

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Motivation

• Personality influences language use
• Do Extraversion and Neuroticism influence
  interaction in dialogue?
• Yes But not entirely in the ways expected

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Structure of Talk

• Personality and interaction
• Personality and language
• Our personality priming experiment
• Results
• Summary
• Discussion and conclusion

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Introduction Personality and interaction

• Individual communicative styles
• Characteristic language features of personality
• Role of personality in dialogue setting?
• Conversational behaviour studies
• Cognitive and Social approaches
• Social (e.g., co-operation, audience design)
• Cognitive (e.g., co-ordination, interpersonal
  priming)
• Insights into processing ability?

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Background Personality and language

• Traits
• Extraversion, Neuroticism
• common to major models of personality
• Effect of personality on language
• Extraversion (High)
• Talk louder (Scherer, 1978) less hesitation,
  more semantic errors more pronouns, adverbs and
  verbs (Dewaele Furnham, 2000)
• Neuroticism (High)
• More negative emotion words, fewer positive
  emotion words (Pennebaker King, 1999) more
  repetitious (Gill, 2003)
• And in conversation
• Extraverts initiate more laughter (Gifford
  Hine, 1994) initiate more interactions
  (McCroskey Richmond, 1990), even in CMC
  (Yellen, et al., 1995), and show lower
  communication anxiety (contrast High Neurotics,
  Dewaele, 2002)

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Background Personality and language in
interaction

• However
• Majority of work focused on monologue language
  behaviour
• Even when studying conversational dialogue
• Language interactive response to interlocutor
• Influence of personality on interaction
• Hemispheric asymmetry (Davidson, 2001)
• Extraversion and positive affect approach
  behaviours
• Neuroticism and negative affect withdrawal
  behaviours
• What do we expect to find?
• High Extraverts greater approach more
  linguistic co-ordination
• Less resources for lexical planning, re-use
  partners syntactic choice
• High Neuroticism greater withdrawal less
  linguistic co-ordination
• Inward focus, less interaction with environment

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Method

• 40 University of Edinburgh Students
• Completed NEO-PI questionnaire (Costa McCrae,
  1992)
• 24 picture prime and target pairs featuring
• 12 easily recognisable transitive verbs (e.g.,
  bite, chase, kick, lift, )
• 120 filler pictures of intransitive verbs to
  match and describe
• All pictures had the verb printed underneath
• Confederate Priming Methodology (Pickering
  Branigan, 1998)
• Confederate and participant take turns describing
  pictures
• Task is for other person to judge whether their
  on-screen image matches the description

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Method Confederate Priming Experiment
Computer monitor
GIVE
GIVE
The cricketer eating the witch/ The witch
being eaten by the cricketer.
CONFEDERATE
PARTICIPANT
Confederate
script

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Results

• Significant priming effect of prime type (active
  vs. passive) on the proportion of passives used
• ANOVA F1 (1, 39) 24.88 p lt 0.001 F2 (1, 23)
  74.10 p lt 0.001
• High and Low N groups prime less than the Mid N
  group
• Interaction between Neuroticism (Low, Mid, High)
  and prime type (F (1, 37) 3.38 p lt 0.05)
• Post-hoc Tukey tests show High and Low N groups
  prime significantly less than Mid N groups (p lt
  0.05)
• No significant interaction found between
  Extraversion and prime
• However, Mid Extraverts primed more than High or
  Low groups

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Results Percentage of priming by personality
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Results

• Significant priming effect of prime type (active
  vs. passive) on the proportion of passives used
• ANOVA F1 (1, 39) 24.88 p lt 0.001 F2 (1, 23)
  74.10 p lt 0.001
• High and Low N groups prime less than the Mid N
  group
• Interaction between Neuroticism (Low, Mid, High)
  and prime type (F (1, 37) 3.38 p lt 0.05)
• Post-hoc Tukey tests show High and Low N groups
  prime significantly less than Mid N groups (p lt
  0.05)
• No significant interaction found between
  Extraversion and prime
• However, Mid Extraverts primed more than High or
  Low groups

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Summary

• High Neurotics behaved as expected and primed
  less
• More withdrawn and inward focus
• However, how can we explain these results for Low
  Neurotics?
• Less monitoring of self relative to partner?
• Caution required in such speculative
  interpretation
• Future work required larger sample
• Which Neuroticism facets most relevant to
  priming?
• Significant findings for Extraversion?
• Investigate other priming effects (ditransitive,
  lexical, )

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Conclusion

• We have shown that Neuroticism is related to
  interpersonal priming
• However both High and Low groups prime less
• Over- or under- other-directedness
• Extraversion showed similar but non-significant
  priming behaviour
• Implications
• More insight into personality in conversational
  behaviour and interaction
• Further evidence for dialogue and priming
• Informative for computer applications modelling
  human personality behaviour
• Future work
• Extend the study with different priming
• Examine the role of different personality facets
  in priming behaviour

How do you prime?