Whether or not a couple lasts long can be predicted from how to talk

"Similar thingsIt is known that people similar in character, sense of values, appearance and the like tend to be involved and to associate and get married.

University of Texas at AustinPsychologists analyzed patterns of how to use words in e-mails, messengers, chatting, etc. between conversations between first-time participants and actual couple in a relationship, people with similar conversation styles It was revealed that couples are more likely to have a long lasting relationship as they are more likable and have similar usage patterns of words.

Details are as below.The Language of Young Love: The Ways Couples Talk Can Predict Relationship Success - Association for Psychological Science

Psychologist at the University of Texas at AustinJames PennebakerProfessors,Function words(Function word) "focusing on the conversation pattern analysis program, we found that the couple" can last long "can be predicted based on the degree of agreement between patterns of usage of function words. Thesis isPsychological ScienceIt is published in the magazine.

"Function word" is used very often in usual conversation and sentences such as "the" "a" "be" "anything" "that" "will" "him" "and" In words that do not have a specific meaning and have a meaning according to the context, it is difficult to define clearly, but it is different from nouns and verbs in nouns and verbs, and how such nouns and verbs are related in sentences Words that indicate whether or not ". In Japanese, "that", "that", "there", "how", "how do you feel" and so on.

According to Professor Pennebaker, the "style" of conversation or sentence is based on the pattern of usage of these function words, "Function words are very social, and social skills are required to use them For example, if you talk about "thesis" in a few minutes after talking about the paper that will be announced soon, you can tell which part of the paper you are talking to, but I do not know for those who did not exist in the previous conversation I'm explaining.

Professors Pennebaker and colleagues explore from the "style" of the words during the conversation and sentence exchange between the two people whether they can predict whether the relationship between the two will develop and whether the relationship lasts long , We conducted two experiments.

In the first experiment, we had a pair of subjects of university students who we met for the first time, asked them to spend a 4-minute "speed date", recorded the conversation, woken up and analyzed them. Most of the pairs asked basic questions such as "What is your major?" "Where is the local?" "Questioned university already?" And the topic of the conversation was almost the same. When listening with the ears, every pair sounds as if it does not differ much, but when analyzing how to use "function words" by waking up to the letters, we found that the degree of conversation style's agreement varies greatly depending on the pair. And the pair whose conversation style match higher than the average is four times as much as the pair that answers "I want to contact the other party I met today" in comparison with the pair with low coincidence.

Next, when we analyzed ten days of actual exchange of couple on the net, 80% of the couples with a high degree of matching of the sentences' style were in a relationship after 3 months, while the style was Half of the couple who did not match were separated after three months.

By the way, although it corresponds only to English, Professor Pennebaker has released a tool to analyze the degree of conformity of sentence styles from two e-mails and messenger conversations, transcription transcriptions and other sentences samples .

Language Style Matching


Compare mails for mails, messengers for messengers, and input samples for each person's sentences separately.


In the result screen, the score (1.0 is the maximum, the higher the match degree is, the higher the match), and it tells you whether it is higher or lower than the average. In general, real time conversation, such as chatting, telephone conversation and talking, has a higher score than e-mail and letters and other time difference exchanges, and the conversation lord pays attention to each other It is said that the score gets higher the more it is.


People are not imitating their way of speaking and writing style consciously, but doing something unconsciously similar when paying attention to the partner in the conversation. Instead of having a couple that is similar in their way of talking last long, it seems to be thought that a couple will be separated soon because "they are not interested in each other already and they do not pay attention to others during talking, .

I do not know if it can analyze 'style' in Japanese as well as in English, but there are many people who can sense that 'somehow the way of talking is similar' or 'The way of writing e-mails' is somehow Is it not? People who have experiences of "I could not feel any sign of parting" are "when I was first meeting" "When I got along well" "When I was my first date" "When I started talking to you" "I still think it's a love It seems interesting if you compare whether the sentence styles are similar if there are e-mail exchanges, etc. at different times such as ... ".