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The Implicit Achievement Motive in the Writing Style

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Abstract

Linguistic theories and research indicate that unconscious processes should influence the content, but moreover also the way how things are expressed. As the first is well researched and the second is almost neglected, I want to assess how the writing style of a person is related to the implicit achievement motive and its two components hope of success (HS) and fear of failure (FF). Therefore, thematic apperception test/picture story exercise responses of 2942 persons were analyzed regarding the three writing style features (1) syntax, (2) nominal/verbal writing, and (3) function words. According to the assumptions, the results of two independent measures (Stanford Parser and LIWC) show that a verbal fluent writing style with simple syntax is associated with HS, whereby FF-motivated people show nominal writing with interjections, conjunctions, and complex punctuations.

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Acknowledgements

The preparation of some data used here was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (GR4520/3-1; Nicole Gruber). The funder had no influence in the conception, study design, data analysis, preparation of the manuscript, and the decision to publish. I want to thank Oliver C. Schultheiss (Heckhausen archive data) and Guido Breidebach (student data) for leaving me data for this research project beside my own data, as well as students (alphabetic order) Franziska Bichlmayer, Nina Feicht, Franziska Jägel, Sofie Kling, Veronika Pragner, Lea Riesinger, Daniel Schleicher, Dennis Schmidt and Olivia Schwemmer for the data processing. Some of the data were already used in Gruber, N & Jockisch, A. (2020). Are GRU Cells more specific and LSTM Cells more sensitive in motive coding of text, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence with another research question. Finally, I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments as well as Leo Atwood for the English writing style correction.

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Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, GR4520/3-1, Nicole Gruber.

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  1. Department of Culture, Speech and Language, Universität Regensburg, Universitätsstraße 31, D-93053, Regensburg, Germany

    Nicole Gruber

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Gruber, N. The Implicit Achievement Motive in the Writing Style. J Psycholinguist Res 51, 1143–1164 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09891-7

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