It seems that the way we talk, gives away whether we are male or female. In a study of the different words used by various demographics of Facebook users in their status updates, it found that women talked most about shopping and their hair, while men usually posted stuff about sports, video games and war.

The new study was conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center, who analyzed 700 million words, phrases and topics pulled from the Facebook status updates of 75,000 volunteers.

The study looked for words that were able to distinguish men from women, old from young and the extraverts from introverts.






The researchers also studied how the words used in tweets from different regions can predict the well-being of people living there.

They looked for words that could predict whether someone was male or female, and whether or not they were young and old. Some other insights they found:
  • Women used more emotion words, like "excited," and more of the first-person singular. They talked about love more often.
  • Men used the possessive "my" when talking about their girlfriend or wife more often than women used the words "my" together with "boyfriend" or "husband." Women tended to use words like "her" or "amazing" with mentions of significant others; perhaps they're talking about other people's amazing husbands more often.
  • Men used more swear words, and referenced more objects, like "Xbox."
They also looked at word usage by age range:



People who are younger tend to talk about school and those in their mid 20s talked more about work, drinks and weddings. Older folk on Facebook bombard you with babies and family. Mostly babies.

The researchers also had the volunteers take a personality test to compare the words they used to see where they fall on scales of personality traits.





So introverts talked more about anime, computers, and photoshop, while the extroverts are more into parties, boys, girls, love and having fun.

Do you agree? Which category do you fall under?