rid analysis

What is this?

This ljArchive plugin provides a psychological profile of your journal by performing a categorical content analysis, and shows the results as a Summary graph, a graph Over Time, or a summary as HTML Code that you can paste in your journal. The analysis is divided into three main categories:

Primary process thinking
Primordial thought - the type of thinking found in fantasy and reverie - described by Freud as the "id". This kind of thought is associative, free-form, and takes little account of reality.
Secondary process thinking
Conceptual thought - abstract, logical, reality oriented, and aimed at problem solving. In Freudian terms, this is the domain of the "ego".
Emotion
The part of thinking that involves feeling and sensibility.

What do the results mean?

Each category you pick to analyze will display as a bar graph with a value from 0% to 100%. Your score is standardized - 50% represents the average. You can pick three baselines to compare your scores against - everyone (the rest of LiveJournal), people your gender, and people in your age group.

For example, if you select the "Anxiety" category and the score is 75, this places you in the 75th percentile - 75% of the LiveJournal community writes about anxiety themes less than you do. However, if you then select the "My Age Group" item from the Baseline options, and the score drops to 58, this means that 58% of people in your age group write about anxiety themes less than you do. You can take solace in the fact that, in your age group, it's "more common" to write about anxiety themes.

HOW DOES THIS WORK?

The Regressive Imagery Dictionary (Martindale, 1990) is composed of about 3200 word roots, assigned to 43 categories: 29 primary process categories, 7 secondary process categories, and 7 emotion categories. The rationale behind the dictionary is that there is a strong correlation between psychological processes and text content. The more primordial the thoughts, the fewer abstract/secondary process thinking words it will contain, and conversely, the more conceptual, the fewer primary process words. This method of content analysis has been researched and shown to be valid (Martindale, 1975, 1990).

When the plugin is loaded, it scans every word in every journal entry and keeps a tally of the percentage of words in the journal that fall into each category. This tally of percentages is sent to a server so that it can be standardized against the pool of results. This gives the measurements more meaning - achieving .00023 for a category frequency means very little until it is understood in the context of the rest of LiveJournal.

What are the categories?

These are the categories in the Regressive Imagery Dictionary, along with some example words:

PRIMARY PROCESS

Drive
Oral - breast, drink, lip
Anal - sweat, rot, dirty
Sex - lover, kiss, naked
Sensation
General Sensation - fair, charm, beauty
Touch - touch, thick, stroke
Taste - sweet, taste, bitter
Odor - breath, perfume, scent
Sound - hear, voice, sound
Vision - see, light, look
Cold - cold, winter, snow
Hard - rock, stone, hard
Soft - soft, gentle, tender
Defensive Symbolization
Passivity - die, lie, bed
Voyage - wander, desert, beyond
Random Movement - wave, roll, spread
Diffusion - shade, shadow, cloud
Chaos - wild, crowd, ruin
Regressive Cognition
Unknown - secret, strange, unknown
Timelessness - eternal, forever, immortal
Consciousness Alteration - dream, sleep, wake
Brink-passage - road, wall, door
Narcissism - eye, heart, hand
Concreteness - at, where, over
Icarian Imagery
Ascend - rise, fly, throw
Height - up, sky, high
Descend - fall, drop, sink
Depth - down, deep, beneath
Fire - sun, fire, flame
Water - sea, water, stream
SECONDARY PROCESS
Abstraction - know, may, thought
Social Behavior - say, tell, call
Instrumental Behavior - make, find, work
Restraint - must, stop, bind
Order - simple, measure, array
Temporal References - when, now, then
Moral Imperative - should, right, virtue
EMOTIONS
Positive Affect - cheerful, enjoy, fun
Anxiety - afraid, fear, phobic
Sadness - depression, dissatisfied, lonely
Affection - affectionate, marriage, sweetheart
Aggression - angry, harsh, sarcasm
Expressive Behavior - art, dance, sing
Glory - admirable, hero, royal

What about my privacy?

This category frequencies this plugin sends to the server for standardization are completely anonymous. No actual entry data from your journal is sent, nor is there any way to identify the data that the server receives to a particular journal.

References

Martindale, C. (1975). Romantic progression: The psychology of literary history. Washington, D.C.: Hemisphere.

Martindale, C. (1990). The clockwork muse: The predictability of artistic change. New York: Basic Books.