Evaluation of Semantic Change of Harm-Related Concepts in Psychology

摘要

The paper focuses on diachronic evaluation of semantic changes of harm-related concepts in psychology. More specifically, we investigate a hypothesis that certain concepts such as 'addiction', 'bullying', 'harassment', 'prejudice', and 'trauma' became broader during the last four decades. We evaluate semantic changes using two models: an LSA-based model from Sagi et al. (2009) and a diachronic adaptation of word2vec from Hamilton et al. (2016), that are trained on a large corpus of journal abstracts covering the period of 1980-2019. Several concepts showed evidence of broadening. 'Addiction' moved from physiological dependency on a substance to include psychological dependency on gaming and the Internet. Similarly, 'harassment' and 'trauma' shifted towards more psychological meanings. On the other hand, 'bullying' has transformed into a more victim-related concept and expanded to new areas such as workplaces.