When danger strikes: A linguistic tool for tracking America’s collective response to threats

Choi, Virginia K.; Shrestha, Snehesh; Pan, Xinyue; Gelfand, Michele J.

doi:10.1073/pnas.2113891119

Cited by 19 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…This big-data text analysis approach has been recently applied to studying various social issues. It has shown that word use frequency measures were indeed sensitive to social and psychological properties, including social norms, gender norms, response to threat, and romantic relation patterns, as validated with nonlinguistic behavioral data (2,26,36,37).…”

Section: Main Textmentioning

confidence: 78%

Pathogens shape human collective conceptual processing

Fu¹,

Chen²,

Sun³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Infectious disease has been a major cause of death throughout human history. The human cultural evolution framework assumes that these stress variables have broadly shaped human psychology. However, how it affects basic cognitive components is largely unknown. Using historical data from the past century in the US, UK, Italy, and China, the research found that pathogen severity variation was associated with significant changes in the collective semantic space, as reflected in language, in similar ways across the countries. In all four countries, increasing pathogen severity led to increased use of words about sensory-motor properties, tight social relations and traditional values, robust against alternative stress variables, such as war, natural disaster or general economic growth. These results highlight the universal dynamic mechanisms of semantics and the effect of pathogens in driving sensorial, tight/traditional-value oriented semantic processing.

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Section: Main Textmentioning

confidence: 78%

Pathogens shape human collective conceptual processing

Fu¹,

Chen²,

Sun³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…Like all measures in psychology, text-based measures should be examined for their validity (see Table 2). Prior work highlights the importance of benchmarking in historical text analysis (see Choi et al, 2022;Garg et al, 2018;Winkler, 2022). Researchers should validate their data against temporal and geographic ground truth (e.g., survey-based data) to make sure…”

Section: Benchmarkingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historical Psychology

Atari¹,

Henrich²

2022

Preprint

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A growing body of evidence suggests that many aspects of psychology have evolved culturally over historical time. A combination of approaches, including experimental data collected over the last 75 years, cross-cultural comparisons and studies of immigrants, points to systematic changes in psychological domains as diverse as conformity, attention, emotion, morality and olfaction, and the need for a cultural evolutionary psychology. To tackle this challenge most directly, computational methods emerging from natural language processing can be adapted to extract psychological information from large-scale historical corpora. Here, we first review the benefits of psychology as a historical science, and then present three useful classes of text-analytic techniques for historical psychological inquiry: dictionary-based methods, distributed-representational methods, and human-annotation-based methods. These represent an excellent suite of methodologies that can be used to examine the record of “dead minds.” Finally, we discuss the importance of going beyond English-centric text analysis in historical psychology to foster a more generalizable and inclusive science of human behavior. We propose that historical psychology should incorporate and further develop a variety of text-analytic approaches to reliably quantify the historical processes that gave rise to contemporary social, political, and psychological phenomena.

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“…As an example, consider the recent work of Choi et al (2022), who develop a "threat dictionary". That is, they derive a set of words (or a lexicon) for which they argue their presence in mass communication indicates a cultural feeling of threat.…”

Section: Closed-vocabulary Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three families of automated text analysis

Loon¹

2022

Social Science Research

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When danger strikes: A linguistic tool for tracking America’s collective response to threats

Cited by 19 publications

References 53 publications

Pathogens shape human collective conceptual processing

Pathogens shape human collective conceptual processing

Historical Psychology

Three families of automated text analysis

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