Over the last decade, psychological interventions, such as the values affirmation intervention, have been shown to alleviate the male-female performance difference when delivered in the classroom, however, attempts to scale the intervention are less successful. This study provides unique evidence on this issue by reporting the observed differences between two randomized controlled implementations of the values affirmation intervention: (a) successful in-class and (b) unsuccessful online implementation at scale. Specifically, we use natural language processing to explore the discourse features that characterize successful female students’ values affirmation essays to gain insight on the underlying mechanisms that contribute to the beneficial effects of the intervention. Our results revealed that linguistic dimensions related to aspects of cohesion, affective, cognitive, temporal, and social orientation, independently distinguished between males and females, as well as more and less effective essays. We discuss implications for the pipeline from theory to practice and for psychological interventions.

在过去的十年中，心理干预（例如价值观确认干预）已被证明能够缓解课堂上男女表现的差异，但是，扩大干预规模的尝试却不太成功。这项研究通过报告观察到的两种价值确认干预措施的随机对照实施方案之间的差异，为这一问题提供了独特的证据：（a）成功的课堂上和（b）大规模的在线实施方案失败。具体来说，我们使用自然语言处理来探索表征成功女学生的价值观肯定性论文的话语特征，以深入了解有助于干预的有益作用的潜在机制。我们的结果表明，语言维度与凝聚力的各个方面有关，情感，认知，时间和社会取向分别在男性和女性之间以及在越来越少的有效论文中有所区别。我们讨论了从理论到实践以及心理干预的含义。