Life history strategy and everyday word use

Research by Sherman et al. (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105, 873–888, 2013) has shown that, in speech during clinical-style interviews, life history strategy (LHS) was correlated with variation in the use of 16–19 word categories from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program. However, links between individual difference variables and word use have been shown to vary as a function of communication context. Therefore, I sought to replicate their results using speech recorded during participants’ daily life via the Electronically Activated Recorder. I also used (1) observer ratings rather than self-ratings of the California Adult Q-Sort (CAQ) items as a measure of LHS, (2) the self-report Arizona Life History Battery (ALHB) as an additional measure of LHS, and (3) Bayesian multi-level aggregated binomial regressions as a complementary analytical technique to conventional correlations. In general, the Sherman et al. results were replicated, particularly with respectiv...