Computergestützte quantitative Textanalyse

Books average previous decade of economic misery

For the 20^th century since the Depression, we find a strong correlation between a ‘literary misery index’ derived from English language books and a moving average of the previous decade of the annual U.S. economic misery index, which is the sum of inflation and unemployment rates. We find a peak in the goodness of fit at 11 years for the moving average. The fit between the two misery indices holds when using different techniques to measure the literary misery index, and this fit is significantly better than other possible correlations with different emotion indices. To check the robustness of the results, we also analysed books written in German language and obtained very similar correlations with the German economic misery index. The results suggest that millions of books published every year average the authors' shared economic experiences over the past decade.

Easier When Done Than Said!

Evidence for the criterion validity of indirect self-esteem measures is still limited, with only some studies finding effects of implicit (ISE) independent of explicit (ESE) self-esteem. This may be due to the fact that studies predicting actual behavior are particularly rare. The present study contributes evidence to the predictive validity of the Implicit Association Test and a recently developed self-judgment task under cognitive load. We used criteria beyond self-report: experimenter ratings of anxiety, linguistic aspects of anxiety, and spontaneous self-confident behaviors. Using paired criteria, we tested a double dissociation of ISE and ESE. Results supported our hypothesis: ISE predicted self-confident behaviors or aspects of anxiety that ESE was not able to predict, and vice versa. Thus, differential predictive validity of both measures of self-esteem was demonstrated. With behavioral criteria that tapped into impulsive processes, ISE was a better predictor than ESE was.