"Your language betrays you"... - psycholinguistic analysis of the inaugural speeches of Barack Obama and Donald Trump

The individualized use of verbalization reveals complex cognitive emotional linguistic data. How these variables contribute to the understanding of a speaker's personality is part to the resonating minds theory and the cycles model according to Mergenthaler that allows cognitive emotional regulation processes in a given text source to be empirically observed. This article compares the inaugural speeches of two Presidents of the USA, Donald Trump and his predecessor Barack Obama. The results demonstrate that Obama's speech is marked by a cyclical regulation that comprises highly emotional moments and moments of emotional and cognitive integration but also relaxing states between cycles. In contrast Trump's speech varies between two states, highly emotional or highly abstract. Instances of emotional and cognitive integration are missing. The findings are discussed with respect to the psychoanalytical perspective of the prognostic quality of the first encounter between the patient and analyst and clinical groups. In particular there is a comparison with the inaugural speech von Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States of America, whose personality was the topic of a psychological analysis coauthored by Sigmund Freud.