The Impact of Aging on Egyptian Adults’ Use of Affective Language

The present paper adopts a psycholinguistic perspective in an attempt to study the impact of aging on the use of affective language. The paper provides a quantitative-qualitative analysis of a study conducted with 90 Egyptian adults of different age groups in order to investigate their emotional perception of words related to personal experiences and social relationships as well as their use of affective language to describe a real-life situation, adopting the framework of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) model proposed by Pennebaker, Booth and Francis (2001). The findings of the present study partially agree with the findings of previous research in regard to the inclination of individuals above 40 to use more positive affective language. Yet, contrary to previous research which found that the increase in positive affect continues well into old age, the present study found that positive affective language use starts to decline after the age of sixty.