Interests & Methods

As a graduate student in training to become a personality and social psychologist, I am interested in the dark side of humanity--at the level of intra-psychic processes (e.g., self-deception), at the level of interpersonal traits (e.g., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy), and at the level of nations (e.g., propaganda).

To study these topics, methods are drawn from a number of fields, such as evolutionary psychology, social cognition, and naturalistic observation (e.g., Mehl's Electronically Activated Recorder).

Recently, my colleagues and I have been using semantic modeling to create a general method, casstools.org, which allows one to detect discrepancies in semantic structure across user-supplied texts--to explore individual or group differences in bias, attitudes, stereotypes, self-esteem, or self-concept. A primer on this topic can be found here or here. See below for some useful text-analytic software we've created.

Education

Ph.D. (expected) in Spring 2011
Washington University in St. Louis
Area of Specialization: Personality and Social Psychology

M.A., Psychology
Washington University in St. Louis

B.A., Psychology
Loyola University New Orleans
Summa Cum Lauda

Articles and Chapters

Holtzman, N. S., & Strube, M. J. (2010). Narcissism and attractiveness. Journal of  Research in Personality, 44, 133-136. PDF News: Miller-McCune

Holtzman, N. S. & Strube, M. J. (in press). The intertwined evolution of narcissism and short-term mating: An emerging hypothesis. In W. K. Campbell & J. D. Miller (Eds.) The Handbook of Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorders: Theoretical Approaches, Empirical Findings, and Treatments. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. [email me for a copy]

Holtzman, N. S., Vazire, S., & Mehl, M. R. (in press). Sounds like a narcissist: Behavioral manifestations of narcissism in everyday life. Journal of Research in Personality. PDF News: Psychology Today

In Progress

Gosling, S., Augustine, A. A., Vazire, S., Holtzman, N. S., & Gaddis, S. (revise and resubmit). Manifestations of personality in online social networks: User behaviors and observable features of Facebook Profiles.

Holtzman, N. S., Schott, J. P., Jones, M. N., Balota, D. A., & Yarkoni, T. (revise and resubmit). Exploring media bias using text-analysis, with general methods to quantify discrepancies in semantics across texts.

Other Written Contributions

Holtzman, N. S. & Yarkoni, T. (2010). More residues of personality in language use: A primer. P: The Newsletter for the Association for Research in Personality. Link

Holtzman, N. S. (2010). Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Definition and description. Psychology Today website. Link

Software for Text Analysis

To get started with these programs, you will need to download Ruby and SciTE (a Ruby download option); instructions for how to run the programs below are on the CASS website or in the programs themselves.

Contrast Analysis of Semantic Similarity (CASS). Useful for exploring group and individual differences in semantic structure. It can be used on any user-supplied text. Written by Yarkoni, T. & Holtzman, N. S. Download here

Text_Analytic_Utilities [ TAU.zip ]. A package of software for text-analysts that I created with my colleagues. Place the unzipped Text_Analytic_Utilities folder into c:/ and right-click the folder to allow you the option of creating a desktop-shortcut to it.

Extract_Sentences_of_Length_i. Takes a file and splits it into separate files of sentences equal in word length (e.g., all 10-word sentences). Useful for controlling sentence length.

Parser. Slices any text into easily-read text (e.g., gets rid of capitalized words and punctuation)--useful for text-analysis.

Phrase_Count. Counts the number of times that phrases (or words) appear in one or more text documents.

Word_Count. Tallies word frequencies in a text document.

I also recommend looking into BEAGLE, LIWC, and LSA.

Courses Taught

Personality Psychology (Summer 2008; Summer 2009)

Funding

2010-2011 Full Dissertation Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis

2004 Richard Frank Grant for research on self-awareness.
Loyola University New Orleans; Amount: $1,000+.

Key Collaborators:

J.P. Schott, Mike Strube (my mentor), Simine Vazire, and Tal Yarkoni.