Pronouns in marital interaction: What do ‘you’ and ‘I’ say about marital health

ABSTRACT—Recent studies in social psychology have found that the frequency of certain words in people’s speech and writing is related to psychological aspects of their personal health. We investigated whether counts of ‘‘self’ ’ and ‘‘other’ ’ pronouns used by 59 couples engaged in a prob-lem-solving discussion were related to indices of marital health. One spouse in each couple had a diagnosis of ob-sessive-compulsive disorder or panic disorder with ago-raphobia; 50 % of the patients and 40 % of their spouses reported marital dissatisfaction. Regardless of patients’ diagnostic status, spouses who used more second-person pronouns were more negative during interactions, whereas those who used more first-person plural pronouns produced more positive problem solutions, even when negative be-havior was statistically controlled. Moreover, use of first-person singular pronouns was positively associated with marital satisfaction. These findings suggest that pronouns used by spouses during conflict-resolution discussions provide insight into the quality of their interactions and marriages. How people talk to one another clearly reflects the nature and quality of their relationships. Less obvious is which variables are important to successful communication and relationship health. Recent findings in social psychology suggest that sta-tistical analysis of easily countable features of linguistic corpora may provide some insight. Social psychologists, led by the wor