The Science of Receptiviti
Language is one of the most reliable windows into human psychology. Receptiviti measures it. Grounded in 30 years of research at the intersection of language and psychology, validated across 34,000 independent studies.
When people communicate, they use two different categories of words – “content words” and “function words.” Content words are the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs people use to articulate the specifics of what they are talking about.
Function words are primarily pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions – they provide no context, but these words exist to explain or create structural relationships into which the content words fit.
From a physiological perspective, function words are also unique because they are processed differently in the brain – unlike content words they are processed largely unconsciously.
Decades of research has been conducted to understand the relationship between people's use of function words and what they tell us about people's personality, psychology, and cognitive state.
Receptiviti Co-founder, Dr. James W. Pennebaker, former Chair of the Psychology Department at the University of Texas at Austin, was a pioneer in language psychology who recognized the importance of function words in understanding human psychology.
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