Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC)

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007) is a word counting software program that references a dictionary of grammatical, psychological, and content word categories. LIWC has been used to efficiently classify texts along psychological dimensions and to predict behavioral outcomes, making it a text analysis tool widely used in the social sciences. LIWC can be considered to be a tool for applied natural language processing since, beyond classification, the relative uses of various LIWC categories can reflect the underlying psychology of demographic characteristics, honesty, health, status, relationship quality, group dynamics, or social context. By using a comparison group…