Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Scholars have approached social psychology from two perspectives: a sociological one and a psychological one. Although two perspectives have mostly developed in a parallel way, both has paid much attention into a common area: societal changes and their psychological impacts. Past sociological research on Chinese societal changes has focused on two aspects: changes in society or social structure, and changes in people. The former mainly involves urbanization, social class, social mobility, and family structure; the latter mainly involves Chinese experience, social mentality, group psychology, and organizational psychology. Research suggests that while modern individualism has been on the rise, traditional collectivism has been declining. Compared with psychological approach, sociological approach tends to adopt more emic concepts and qualitative analyses, pays more attention to group psychology as well as the influences of politics and policy, and employs more macro-historical perspective. In future research, Chinese social psychologists from the two perspectives need to learn from and collaborate with each other, ultimately achieving a better understanding of the change of Chinese people and Chinese society.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： As a fundamental technique in natural language processing (NLP), word embedding quantifies a word as a low-dimensional, dense, and continuous numeric vector (i.e., word vector). This process is based on machine learning algorithms such as neural networks, through which semantic features of a word can be extracted automatically. There are two types of word embeddings: static and dynamic. Static word embeddings aggregate all contextual information of a word in an entire corpus into a fixed vectorized representation. The static word embeddings can be obtained by predicting the surrounding words given a word or vice versa (Word 2Vec and FastText) or by predicting the probability of co-occurrence of multiple words (GloVe) in large-scale text corpora. Dynamic or contextualized word embeddings, in contrast, derive a word vector based on a specific context, which can be generated through pre-trained language models such as ELMo, GPT, and BERT. Theoretically, the dimensions of a word vector reflect the pattern of how the word can be predicted in contexts; however, they also connote substantial semantic information of the word. Therefore, word embeddings can be used to analyze semantic meanings of text. In recent years, word embeddings have been increasingly applied to study human psychology. In doing this, word embeddings have been used in various ways, including the raw vectors of word embeddings, vector sums or differences, absolute or relative semantic similarity and distance. So far, the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) has received the most attention. Based on word embeddings, psychologists have explored a wide range of topics, including human semantic processing, cognitive judgment, divergent thinking, social biases and stereotypes, and sociocultural changes at the societal or population level. Particularly, the WEAT has been widely used to investigate attitudes, stereotypes, social biases, the relationship between culture and psychology, as well as their origin, development, and cross-temporal changes. As a novel methodology, word embeddings offer several unique advantages over traditional approaches in psychology, including lower research costs, higher sample representativeness, stronger objectivity of analysis, and more replicable results. Nonetheless, word embeddings also have limitations, such as their inability to capture deeper psychological processes, limited generalizability of conclusions, and dubious reliability and validity. Future research using word embeddings should address these limitations by (1) distinguishing between implicit and explicit components of social cognition, (2) training fine-grained word vectors in terms of time and region to facilitate cross-temporal and cross-cultural research, and (3) applying contextualized word embeddings and large pre-trained language models such as GPT and BERT. To enhance the application of word embeddings in psychological research, we have developed the R package “PsychWordVec”, an integrated word embedding toolkit for researchers to study human psychology in natural language.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology Subjects: Psychology >> Psychological Measurement Subjects: Computer Science >> Natural Language Understanding and Machine Translation submitted time 2023-01-30
Abstract： As a basic technique in natural language processing (NLP), word embedding represents a word with a low-dimensional, dense, and continuous numeric vector (i.e., word vector). Word embeddings can be obtained by using neural network algorithms to predict words from the surrounding words or vice versa (Word2Vec and FastText) or words’ probability of co-occurrence (GloVe) in large-scale text corpora. In this case, the values of dimensions of a word vector denote the pattern of how a word can be predicted in a context, substantially connoting its semantic information. Therefore, word embeddings can be utilized for semantic analyses of text. In recent years, word embeddings have been rapidly employed to study human psychology, including human semantic processing, cognitive judgment, individual divergent thinking (creativity), group-level social cognition, sociocultural changes, and so forth. We have developed the R package “PsychWordVec” to help researchers utilize and analyze word embeddings in a tidy approach. Future research using word embeddings should (1) distinguish between implicit and explicit components of social cognition, (2) train fine-grained word vectors in terms of time and region to facilitate cross-temporal and cross-cultural research, and (3) deepen and expand the application of contextualized word embeddings and large pre-trained language models such as GPT and BERT.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2021-07-03
Abstract： Scholars have approached social psychology from two perspectives: a sociological one and a psychological one. Although two perspectives have mostly developed in a parallel way, both has paid much attention into a common area: societal changes and their psychological impacts. Past sociological research on Chinese societal changes has focused on two aspects: changes in society or social structure, and changes in people. The former mainly involves urbanization, changes of social class, changes of social mobility, and changes of family structure; the latter mainly involves changes of Chinese experience, social mentality, group psychology, and organizational psychology. Compared with psychological approach, sociological approach tends to adopt more emic concepts and qualitative analyses, pay more attention to group psychology as well as the influences of politics and policy, and employ more macro–historical perspective. In future studies, Chinese social psychologists from the two perspectives need to learn from and collaborate with each other, ultimately achieving a better understanding of the change of Chinese people and Chinese society.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2020-08-07
Abstract： " The theory of Behavioral Immune System (BIS) posits that to cope with pandemic stress, human beings have evolved a series of behavioral responses, including vigilance to and disgust of disease cues, preference for healthy mate and collectivism, prejudice against out-groups and so on. For the first time, the existing studies were reviewed according to research level (individual vs. group). A large body of supportive evidence for BIS at both levels was identified, though many inconsistent and/or conflicting findings exist. Reasons leading to such inconsistencies include inadequacies of research methods, theory basis, and applicability in modern society. Future research should examine the boundary conditions of existing findings and theory; extend the scope of the current research; explore the underlying biological and physiological mechanism of BIS."
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