Prof. Juhani Järvikivi (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada) will give a talk on Personality, politics, and language processing on Thursday, November 3, at 15:15 (-17.00)

Prof. Juhani Järvikivi (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada) will give a talk on Personality, politics, and language processing on Thursday, November 3, at 15:15 (-17.00) (Room: Arcanum 355/357, zoom: ask Minna Maijala for the link)

Abstract: Personality, politics, and language processing (PePoL)

Language is one of the seats of human sociality. It’s not a surprise then that the way we use language reflects our identities, who we are and how we see the world and the society around us. Indeed, researchers are able to predict people’s personalities and political ideologies based on their linguistic behaviour in social media. What about the opposite, the more fundamental question: Does who we are predict how we process and understand language? Recent studies from our lab suggest that the answer to this question might be yes. In this talk, I will review this research suggesting that individual differences in political views (conservatism) and personality (e.g., ability to empathize, big-5 traits) influence how they (mis)understand the social goals of communication (interpersonal verbs, irony, and gender-stereotyped language), evaluate speaker accents, and process reference and lies.

Dr. Juhani Järvikivi is a professor of linguistics at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. He received his PhD in 2003 from the University of Eastern Finland (then, University of Joensuu), after which he held postdoctoral positions at the University of Turku, University of Helsinki, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen), as well as an associate professorship at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, before accepting the current position. Järvikivi specializes in experimental and psycholinguistics, spanning topics from lexical to discourse processing in children and adults. His current research program focuses on the role of individual differences, especially aspects of personality and political and moral worldview, in the comprehension of socially charged language.