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 data sets 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.

About the Author

Morteza Dehghani, PhD, is Associate Professor of Psychology and Computer Science and a member of the faculty of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. Dr. Dehghani's research relies on machine learning and natural language processing to explore cognitive and psychological traces in artifacts of social discourse. Specifically, he investigates properties of moral cognition by analyzing language in conjunction with behavioral studies. Dr. Dehghani is a recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and a 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, holding shared appointments in the Department of Psychology, Security Lancaster, and the Data Science Institute. His research interests broadly revolve around how our motives are revealed in language--that is, how our everyday words provide clues to why we think, feel, and behave in the ways that we do. Dr. Boyd's research spans topics ranging from personality to society, mental health, human sexuality, and storytelling. He has authored dozens of free, open-source text analysis programs for social scientists, and he has been involved in the development of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count since 2015. Dr. Boyd is on the editorial boards at PLOS ONE and Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence: Language and Computation, and is a member of the advisory board for Psychology of Language and Communication.

Reviews

"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

"This handbook assembles many of the best researchers who quantitatively analyze language to better understand people. The coverage is impressively broad, from personality to politics, from conversations and deception to the language of affect and morality. The methods used are equally broad, from the use of classical lexica to modern vector embedding methods. This book is ideal for a graduate seminar in psychology or related fields on the ways in which language analysis is yielding insights into human thought, behavior, and communication."--Lyle Ungar, PhD, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania-Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.--Choice Reviews, 4/1/2023

Book Information
ISBN 9781462548439
Author Morteza Dehghani
Format Hardback
Page Count 630
Imprint Guilford Press
Publisher Guilford Publications
Weight(grams) 1220g