The Secret Life of Pronouns - Jamie Pennebaker

This one seems to be a very interesting and a must read book - The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us by Jamie Pennebaker.

Pennebaker is interested in the way that people use language. You might think that liars and people telling the truth talk about different things. In his analysis, though, liars and truth tellers use language in subtly different ways that are hard for people to detect, but can be pulled out of detailed analyses of the words people use.

In particular, Pennebaker and his colleagues take samples of text and count different types of words that people use. For example, they count the types of pronouns people use. Are people using first-person pronouns like I and me, or are they using third person pronouns like he and she? Are they using cognitive words like "I think that I was told about that," or do they just say "I was told about that?"

Perhaps the least surprising aspect of lies is that they are shorter and have fewer details. It is just harder for a liar to come up with specific details of circumstances that did not happen to them. Consequently, stories that are false tend to have fewer words overall and fewer descriptive words than those that are true.

You might think that true stories would have more emotion terms in them than would the lies. But when people are telling the truth, they know how they feel, and so they often don't feel the need to express it. People who are lying need to make the point that they (should be) experiencing a particular emotion, and so they are more prone to talk about it.

The difference in the number of verbs comes primarily from the use of language devices that create some distance between the speaker and the situation when someone is lying. For example, someone telling the truth might say, "I knew better than to do that," but someone lying might say, "I ought to have known better than to do that."