Kay Brauer
René T. ProyerA Correction on
Is the Impostor Phenomenon expressed in language? An LIWC analysis of textual self-descriptions
by Brauer, K., and Proyer, R. T. (2025). Front. Psychol. 16:1628389. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1628389
In the published article, there was an error in the p-value regarding the finding on the association between IP scores and anxiety-related words that falsely indicated p = 0.001 instead of p < 0.001.
A correction has been made to section 3 Results, Paragraph 3. The corrected paragraph is shown below.
“Our main analysis which examined the associations between the LIWC and GCIPS scores showed that the IP was widely independent from language use, as reflected in the frequency of word categories covered by the LIWC. All correlation effect sizes were ≤ 0.14 (see the Supplementary materials for all coefficients; 77 correlations [83.7%] < |0.10|), except for the use of more anxiety-related words (r = 0.22, 95% confidence interval [0.12, 0.33], p < 0.001). The latter met our expectations. Findings from the domain of job application letters (Brandt et al., 2024) did not generalize to self-descriptions—we did not find associations with causation (r = 0.05, [−0.06, 0.16]), words per sentence (r = 0.03, [−0.08, 0.14]), reward motivation (r = 0.00, [−0.11, 0.11]), or work-related words (r = −0.07, [−0.18, 0.04], ps ≥ 0.208). Furthermore, we found the expected positive associations with the use of negative emotion words and comparison words (rs = 0.12, [0.01, 0.23], ps ≤ 0.030), but effect sizes were small. A closer inspection of the negative emotion category showed that the subcategories of anger (r = 0.08, [−0.03, 0.19]) and sadness (r = −0.05 [−0.16, 0.06], ps ≥ 0.150) were not robustly related to the IP. Hence, it can be assumed that the association with negative emotion words was based on the anxiety subcategory and was, thus, negligible despite statistical significance.”
The original version of this article has been updated.
Publisher's note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Keywords: Impostor Phenomenon, LIWC, personality, language, Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale
Citation: Brauer K and Proyer RT (2025) Correction: Is the Impostor Phenomenon expressed in language? An LIWC analysis of textual self-descriptions. Front. Psychol. 16:1702036. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1702036
Received: 09 September 2025; Accepted: 23 September 2025;
Published: 03 October 2025.
Edited and reviewed by: Dusica Filipovic Durdevic, University of Belgrade, Serbia
Copyright © 2025 Brauer and Proyer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Kay Brauer, a2F5LmJyYXVlckBwc3ljaC51bmktaGFsbGUuZGU=