Overview
What is Receptiviti?​
Receptiviti measures the psychological and behavioral signals embedded in language and communication. Receptiviti translates the measurement of the emotions, personality, motivations, thinking styles, interpersonal dynamics, communication styles, and other psychological characteristics expressed through communication into clear, easy-to-understand, highly actionable insights or recommendations.
Receptiviti's goal is to make psychological and behavioral insights measurable at scale without sacrificing scientific rigor, transparency, consistency, or interpretability. Receptiviti combines scientifically validated, deterministic measurement models with scalable technology to produce insights and recommendations that organizations can confidently incorporate into their research, products, workflows, and business decision-making.
What does Receptiviti measure?​
Receptiviti measures a wide range of scientifically validated psychological states and traits reflected in language, including personality, emotions, motivations, thinking styles, interpersonal dynamics, communication styles, behavioral tendencies, and other psychological constructs.
Receptiviti measures are deterministic, meaning that given a particular input, they always produce the exact same output. Receptiviti measures are also interpretable, benchmarkable, and comparable across individuals, groups, organizations, brands, audiences, and other populations. Because language can be measured continuously, Receptiviti can also help organizations understand how these states and traits change over time.
What makes Receptiviti different?​
Unlike opaque or black-box AI or machine learning systems, Receptiviti combines decades of peer-reviewed language psychology research with deterministic, transparent, interpretable measurement models that can be benchmarked, validated, and consistently reproduced.
Rather than relying solely on self-report surveys or assessment sessions, Receptiviti measures the psychological and behavioral signals reflected in written or spoken and transcribed language from virtually any source, whether collected specifically for analysis or generated naturally through everyday communication. This enables organizations to measure psychology at scale and in the contexts that matter, monitor change over time, and apply the same scientific foundation consistently across individuals, teams, organizations, brands, audiences, and other populations.
What is Receptiviti's origin?​
Receptiviti's roots are in academia and a discipline commonly referred to as language psychology, or sometimes psycholinguistics. Language psychology is the scientific study of how language reflects psychological states, traits, motivations, and behavior.
The founding science behind Receptiviti is Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, or LIWC for short. LIWC established many of the scientific methods used to measure psychological signals embedded in language and, with more than 34,000 research citations, remains one of the most widely cited and scientifically validated approaches in psychology and computational social science.
Building on that foundation, with innovation at the forefront, Receptiviti was created to transform decades of language psychology research into a scalable technology platform that helps organizations better understand the people and voices that matter to them, including customers, employees, leaders, brands, and audiences, through the language and communication they produce every day.
The Relationship between LIWC and Receptiviti​
Receptiviti operates as the commercial arm of LIWC (the academic offering). Members of our science and sales teams have worked in Pennebaker’s lab and contributed to various iterations of LIWC. Today, our science team continues to evolve and expand the science, while the customer-facing side of our company supports its application. The science team has developed over 2,600 additional categories using the same validated methodology established in LIWC's original design. Some of these are made available to customers as proportion-based measures (like LIWC Extension), while others are used internally.
Receptiviti’s proportion-based measures, together with LIWC, serve as the foundational ingredients of Receptiviti’s normed algorithmic measures. The normed algorithmic measures are never based on “black box” machine learning models—an important distinction. Instead, they are designed by building formulas from the ground up, selecting and weighting ingredients using both theoretical and data-driven methods.
Theory-based methods draw on more than 25,000 published studies that have used LIWC to predict traits, states, behaviors, and other outcomes. These findings inform how we construct each measure. Data-driven methods include statistical approaches such as principal component analysis, regression modeling, and embeddings to test performance and inform and validate design using our internal datasets.
What kinds of language can Receptiviti analyze?​
Receptiviti analyzes written or transcribed spoken language from virtually any source. This includes AI and chatbot conversations; marketing and public-facing content such as advertising copy, website copy, press releases, campaign copy, and product descriptions; business and organizational communications such as internal communications, emails, memos, employee engagement surveys, and performance reviews; customer interactions and market research data such as customer reviews, customer feedback, support or call center conversations, sales calls, open-ended survey responses, qualitative research interviews, and focus group interviews; meetings and spoken interactions such as team meetings, media interviews, earnings calls, presentations, town halls, and therapy sessions; talent selection and development data such as job interviews and coaching sessions; digital and social communications such as social media posts, chat messages, and online forums; reflective writing such as journals and diaries; and more.
Though human language and psychology are the foundations of our science, Receptiviti measures can also be used to analyze LLM-generated language in order to predict and modulate how people perceive and respond to AI agents or generated content in general, including LLM-generated advertising copy and website text.
What does Receptiviti return?​
Receptiviti uses scientifically validated psychological measures to generate scores as quantitative outputs that serve as the foundation for all Receptiviti products and services. Depending on how an organization works with Receptiviti, outputs may include API responses for integration into custom applications and analyses, interactive reports with integrated interpretations and recommendations, customizable dashboards and visualizations, presentations and written analyses, or custom research and advisory deliverables.
These outputs help organizations better understand people and communication across a wide range of use cases.
How do organizations use Receptiviti?​
Organizations can access Receptiviti through our web-based API, containerized API deployments, interactive reports, dashboards, advisory services, and custom research or consulting engagements, depending on how they want to incorporate psychological insights into their products, workflows, research, or decision-making.
Whether integrated directly into software or AI applications, deployed within an organization's own infrastructure, used to analyze large language datasets, incorporated into strategic consulting engagements, or used to generate interactive reports, dashboards, and recommendations, Receptiviti provides flexible ways to apply language psychology across a wide range of use cases.
Who does Receptiviti help?​
Receptiviti supports organizations across any industry where understanding people or communication creates value. Our customers span industries including AI, technology, finance and investing, marketing, communications, public relations, consumer research, human resources and people analytics, executive development, healthcare, sports, education, social work, government, and mental health support.
Across these sectors, organizations use Receptiviti to better understand users, customers, employees, leaders, brands, audiences, patients, and other populations through the language and communication they produce every day.
Click any of the links below to get started, find practical information on our science and technology, access step-by-step guides, or to find reference documentation on our products and services.