Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the use of computerized text analysis methods to address basic psychological questions. This comprehensive handbook brings together leading language analysis scholars to present foundational concepts and methods for investigating human thought, feeling, and behavior using language. Contributors work toward integrating psychological science and theory with natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. Ethical issues in working with natural language datasets are discussed in depth. The volume showcases NLP-driven techniques and applications in areas including interpersonal relationships, personality, morality, deception, social biases, political psychology, psychopathology, and public health.
Morteza Dehghani, PhD, is Associate Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at the University of Southern California, and is on the faculty of the Brain and Creativity Institute. Dr. Dehghani's research relies on machine learning and natural language processing to explore cognitive and psychological traces in artifacts of social discourse. Specifically, his work investigates properties of moral cognition by analyzing language, in conjunction with behavioral studies. Dr. Dehghani is a recipient of the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and the Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Ryan L. Boyd, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Behavioral Analytics at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, where he is a member of the Data Science Institute and of Security Lancaster. His research interests broadly revolve around how motives are revealed in language--that is, how people's everyday words provide clues to how they think, feel, and behave. Dr. Boyd's research spans topics ranging from personality to society, mental health, human sexuality, and storytelling. Dr. Boyd has authored dozens of free, open-source text analysis programs for social scientists and is an editor at PLOS One and Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence: Language and Computation.
"Language provides a richer, more detailed window into the human experience than any other source of data, and large-scale computational techniques have created unprecedented opportunities in the study of human psychology. This volume provides a comprehensive examination of language analysis methods and how they are being used across an astonishing range of psychological research. It will be highly valuable to students and scholars in psychology who are seeking a relevant, up-to-date overview of text analysis methods. Conversely, this book also represents an invitation to computational folks to better understand the nature of psychological research questions and the ways that their text analysis expertise can help advance understanding of what makes people tick."--Philip Resnik, PhD, Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland, College Park "The accelerating growth of new computational methods, theories, and applications in language analysis opens up exciting possibilities for researchers, but it can also be daunting if you are entering the field or trying to keep up to speed. But never fear! Dehghani and Boyd have brought together a formidable crew of experts to create an accessible guide to the latest developments in language analysis. This book is an ideal text for a graduate course, and can serve as a reference and source of inspiration for researchers."--Sanjay Srivastava, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Oregon-
