The spoken word

Men are from Mars and Women from Venus has been proved, finally! A computational analysis of the words used by over 65,000 consenting Facebook users in some 10 million messages revealed that women use language that is warmer and more agreeable than men.

Some of the most commonly words used by women include wonderful, happy, birthday, daughter, baby, excited and thankful. Some of the words most commonly cited by men are freedom, liberty, win, lose, battle and enemy. Analysed by psychologists and computer scientists from Stony Brook University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Melbourne in Australia, the study found that additionally, algorithms of language use predicted one’s gender on Facebook 90 percent of the time.

The findings suggest gender influences the way people express themselves on Facebook.

“Looking at language in social media offers a fresh perspective on understanding gender differences,” said H Andrew Schwartz, assistant professor of computer science at Stony Brook University. — IANS