The Roots of Virtue: A Cross-Cultural Lexical Analysis

Although the notion of virtue is increasingly prominent in psychology, the way it has been studied and conceptualised has been relatively Western-centric, and does not fully account for variations in how it has been understood cross-culturally. As such, an enquiry was conducted into ideas relating to virtue found across the world’s cultures, focusing specifically on so-called untranslatable words. Through a quasi-systematic search of academic and grey literature, together with conceptual snowballing and crowd-sourced suggestions, over 200 relevant terms were located. An adapted grounded theory analysis identified five themes which together provide an insight into the “roots” of virtue (i.e., the main sources from which it appears to spring): virtue itself (the concept of it); considerateness (caring about it); wisdom (knowing what it consists of); agency (managing to be/do it); and skill (mastery of the preceding elements). The results help shed further light on the potential dynamics of this important phenomenon

Lexical Profile of Emotional Disclosure in Socially Shared Versus Written Narratives

To disclose emotional experiences, people can either talk or write. Our research was intended to address content differences between social sharing of emotion and expressive writing. In the first study, 92 participants either talked to an experimenter or wrote alone about an emotional experience. In the second study, after watching an emotion-inducing film, 112 participants were asked to disclose their emotions by either writing, talking alone to a recorder, talking with an unknown peer, or talking with someone close to them. Computerised lexical analyses were conducted on all material collected with a central focus on affective and cognitive processes as well as on narrative style indices like personal pronouns. Consistently, results showed a higher proportion of emotion words in writing than in oral conditions. Personal pronoun use, emotional tone, and proportion of cognitive words also appeared to vary depending on disclosure mode and type of narrative targe