Leukocyte gene regulation and patterns of natural language use.. Homo sapiens

Analysis of transcript abundance estimates as a function of demographic, psychometric, and language use features. Overall design: Gene expression profiling was conducted on peripheral blood samples collected from healthy adults in the Atlanta metropolitan area. In addition to background characteristics (age, sex, race/ethnicity, body mass index/BMI, smoking history), participants were also assessed for patterns of natural language use (using the electronically activated recorder system with data processing by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software; Mehl, MR, et al. (2001) The Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR): a device for sampling naturalistic daily activities and conversations Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 33, 517-523; Pennebaker, JW, Booth, RJ & Francis, ME (2007) Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count: LIWC 2007, www.liwc.net) and self-report psychometric measures of stress (Cohen, S, Kessler, RC & Underwood Gordon, L (1995) Perceived Stress Scale. In Measuring stress: A guide for health and social scientists (Oxford University Press, New York)), anxiety (Beck, AT, Epstein, N, Brown, G & Steer, RA (1988) An inventory for measuring clinical anxiety: Psychometric properties Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 56, 893-897), depression (Beck, A, Steer, R & Brown, G (1996) Beck Depression Inventory - Second Edition manual (Psychological Corporation, San Antonio TX)) and loneliness (Russell, D, Peplau, LA & Cutrona, CE (1980) The revised UCLA Loneliness Scale: concurrent and discriminant validity evidence J Pers Soc Psychol. 39, 472-80). Analyses also controlled for variations in the prevalence of distinct leukocyte subsets as indicated by the relative abundance of mRNA encoding CD3D, CD4, CD8A, CD19, CD56/NCAM1, CD16/FCGR3A, and CD14 (each standardized to mean=0/standard deviation=1 for analysis). Derived language metrics include total words spoken (WordCount); average sentence length (WordsPerSentence); frequency of recorded samples in which particpants were talking and were alone; the relative prevalence of 8 general categories of function words (adverbs, articles, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, negations, prepositions, quantifiers, and impersonal pronouns) and 5 sub-categories of personal pronouns (1st person singular (i), 1st person plural (we), 2nd person singular (you), 3rd person singular (shehe), and 3rd person plural (they)); and the categorical-dynamic index (CDI; Pennebaker, JW, et al. (2014) When small words foretell academic success: the case of college admissions essays, PLoS One 9, e115844). Higher values of each scale score indicate greater levels of stress, anxiety, etc. Dichotomous variables were coded 0=no/absent and 1=yes/present. Valid gene expression data are available for 143 participants.