Ryan L. Boyd

Ryan L. Boyd
Stony Brook University | Stony Brook · Department of Computer Science

Ph.D.

About

124
Publications
144,678
Reads
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5,150
Citations
Additional affiliations
July 2022 - present
Obelus Institute
Position
  • Computational Social Scientist
June 2022 - July 2023
TikTok
Position
  • Computational Social Scientist
June 2019 - June 2023
Lancaster University
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
Education
June 2013 - May 2017
University of Texas at Austin
Field of study
  • Social/Personality Psychology
June 2010 - June 2013
North Dakota State University
Field of study
  • Social/Health Psychology
September 2006 - May 2010

Publications

Publications (124)
Article
Full-text available
Background Mental health (MH) peer online forums offer robust support where internet access is common, but healthcare is not, e.g., in countries with under-resourced MH support, rural areas, and during pandemics. Despite their widespread use, little is known about who posts in such forums, and in what mood states. The discussion platform Reddit is...
Article
Full-text available
Background Emotion dysregulation is a characteristic central to borderline personality disorder (BPD). Valuably, verbal behaviour can provide a unique perspective for studying emotion dysregulation in BPD, with recent research suggesting that the varieties of emotion words one actively uses (i.e., active emotion vocabularies [EVs]) reflect habitual...
Article
Full-text available
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the global public has relied on their political leaders toguide them through the crisis. The current study investigated if and how political leader’srhetoric would be associated with collective emotional responses. We used text analyticalmethods to investigate association between political leader speech and daily aggre...
Article
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by severe interpersonal dysfunction, yet the underlying nature of such dysfunction remains poorly understood. The present study adopted a behavioral approach to more objectively describe the social-cognitive contributors to interpersonal dysfunction in BPD. Participants (N = 530) completed an o...
Article
Full-text available
Background Despite its growing prevalence, BDSM practice (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sadomasochism) is still stigmatized, and little is known about the physical marks and injuries that individuals sustain from consensual BDSM-related activities. Aim In this exploratory study, we examined BDSM sexual experiences and the physica...
Article
The stereotypes and biases that people have about various religions may not be applied to just the individuals who belong to those religions, but to the belief systems themselves. We hypothesized that non-Muslim and Muslim Americans would demonstrate biased estimates about the language content of the Quran and New Testament holding positive views t...
Article
Full-text available
Reddit discourse surrounding treatments for autistic individuals is easily accessible. Multiple Reddit threads discuss Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) as one option. Such content impacts decision-making despite the absence of gatekeeping mechanisms to identify misinformation. Using a cross-sectional design, this study explores perceptions of ABA-ba...
Article
Unlabelled: Emotional granularity is the ability to create differentiated and nuanced emotional experiences and is associated with positive health outcomes. Individual differences in granularity are hypothesized to reflect differences in emotion concepts, which are informed by prior experience and impact current and future experience. Greater vari...
Article
Full-text available
While experiencing the unpredictable events of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are likely to turn to people in order to regulate our emotions. In this research, we investigate how this interpersonal emotion regulation is connected to affective symptoms, above and beyond intrapersonal emotion regulation. Furthermore, we explore whether perceived psychosoc...
Article
Full-text available
Some scholars have presented models of the United States as a set of “nations” with distinct settlement histories and contemporary cultures. We examined personality differences in one such model, that of Colin Woodard, using data from over 75,000 respondents. Four nations were particularly distinct: The Deep South, Left Coast, New Netherland, and t...
Article
Full-text available
Despite the established health and ecological benefits of a plant-based diet, the decision to eschew meat and other animal-derived food products remains controversial. So polarising is this topic that anti-vegan communities - groups of individuals who stand vehemently against veganism - have sprung up across the internet. Much scholarship on vegani...
Article
Full-text available
Linguistic features of a message necessarily shape its persuasive appeal. However, studies have largely examined the effect of linguistic features on persuasion in isolation and do not incorporate properties of language that are often involved in real-world persuasion. As such, little is known about the key verbal dimensions of persuasion or the re...
Article
This article examines how verbal authenticity influences person perception. Our work combines human judgments and natural language processing to suggest verbal authenticity is a positive predictor of interpersonal interest (Study 1: 294 dyadic conversations), engagement with speeches (Study 2: 2,655 TED talks), entrepreneurial success (Study 3: 478...
Book
Full-text available
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 wor...
Article
This analysis investigates two differential PowerPoint slide designs-presentation and teleprompter-for multimedia learning. Eye tracking measures assessed differences in fixations. Participants demonstrated greater fixation counts for teleprompter slides, measures of aesthetic liking evidenced that slides incorporating imagery resulted in more plea...
Article
Background This study was aimed at identifying key topics in online discussions about tinnitus by examining a large data set extracted from Reddit social media using a natural language processing technique. Method A corpus of 113,215 posts about tinnitus was extracted from Reddit's application programming interface. After cleaning the data for dup...
Technical Report
Full-text available
The words that people use in everyday life tell us about their psychological states: their beliefs, emotions, thinking habits, lived experiences, social relationships, and personalities. From the time of Freud’s writings about “slips of the tongue” to the early days of computer-based text analysis, researchers across the social sciences have amasse...
Preprint
Full-text available
Emotional granularity is the ability to create differentiated and nuanced emotional experiences and is associated with positive health outcomes. Individual differences in granularity are hypothesized to reflect differences in emotion concepts, which are informed by prior experience and impact current and future experience. Greater variation in expe...
Article
Full-text available
The mental health of college students is a growing concern, and gauging the mental health needs of college students is difficult to assess in real-time and in scale. To address this gap, researchers and practitioners have encouraged the use of passive technologies. Social media is one such "passive sensor" that has shown potential as a viable "pass...
Article
Full-text available
Background: It is critical for professionals to understand the discourse landscape within various online and social media outlets in order to support families of children with autism in treatment decision-making. This need is heightened when considering treatments that have garnered excitement and controversy, such as applied behavioral analysis (A...
Chapter
Full-text available
Today, the development of new technologies means that there are many advanced tools that can be used to improve our understanding of personality disorder, and, in turn, the treatment of personality disorder. One particularly promising tool — indeed, the focus of this chapter — is computerized language analysis. Through the exploration and analysis...
Article
We compare the contents of Fox and MSNBC weekday evening telecasts using natural language analysis with the Linguistic Inventory Word Count (LIWC) and sociopolitical dictionaries tapping into moral foundations, values, grievances, and personality. Across time, the two networks differed substantially across many constructs, particularly those from t...
Article
Objective The primary aim of the study was to examine the automated linguistic analysis of the open-ended problem (PQ) and life-effects (LEQ) questionnaires to understand the psychological effects of tinnitus. Design The study used a cross-sectional design. Participants completed online questionnaires which included demographic questions, several...
Article
Full-text available
Interpersonal relationships are vital to our well-being. In recent years, it has become increasingly common to seek relationship help through anonymous online platforms. Accordingly, we conducted a large-scale analysis of real-world relationship help-seeking to create a descriptive overview of the nature and substance of online relationship help-se...
Article
Background Many patients with sudden sensorineural hearing loss may seek hearing health information and social support online, although little is known about the online information seeking behaviour. Objective The present study aimed to examine the discussions around sudden sensorineural hearing loss in Reddit posts. Method A total of 526 Reddit...
Article
Objectives Studies have shown age differences in adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic. The processes explaining these age differences remain unclear. Intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation play an important role in psycho-social adjustment and develop across the lifespan. This study investigated whether differences in COVID-19-related adju...
Article
Full-text available
Computational methods have increased the objectivity of measures of human behavior and positioned personality science to benefit from the ongoing digital revolution. In this review, we define and discuss computational personality assessment (CPA), a measurement process that uses computational technologies to obtain estimates of personality. We brie...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Using two different analysis techniques, this study explored differences and similarities in information-seeking discourse and overall breast cancer experiences between posters to a Reddit board and breast cancer survivor focus groups. Design: This study incorporates two qualitative methods for determining themes in breast cancer surviv...
Article
Full-text available
Background / Introduction. This work explores the relationship between a person's demographic/psychological traits (e.g., gender, personality) and self-identity images and captions. Methods. We use a dataset of images and captions provided by N ≈ 1, 350 individuals, and we automatically extract features from both the images and captions. Results. W...
Preprint
Full-text available
Due to the explosion of new sources of human language data and the rapid progression of computational methods for extracting meaning from natural language, language analysis is a promising, though complicated, category of psychological research. In this chapter, we give a modern perspective on language analysis as it applies to psychology, uniting...
Preprint
Full-text available
The mental health of college students is a growing concern, and gauging the mental health needs of college students is difficult to assess in real-time and in scale. While social media has shown potential as a viable "passive sensor" of mental health, the construct validity and in-practice reliability of such computational assessments remain largel...
Preprint
Full-text available
The mental health of college students is a growing concern, and gauging the mental health needs of college students is difficult to assess in real-time and in scale. While social media has shown potential as a viable “passive sensor” of mental health, the construct validity and in-practice reliability of such computational assessments remain largel...
Article
While language style is considered to be automatic and relatively stable, its plasticity has not yet been studied in translations that require the translator to “step into the shoes of another person.” In the present study, we propose a psychological model of language adaptation in translations. Focusing on an established interindividual difference...
Preprint
Full-text available
Computational methods for the representation and analysis of data have drastically increased the objectivity, reliability, and the practical implications of research conducted throughout most scientific pursuits. Our rapidly-emerging potential to transform digital data into objective measures of human behavior, thoughts, and feelings has perfectly...
Preprint
Full-text available
Psychologists have long believed that we can discern what makes a person tick by analysing their language. The modern study of language has become a highly sophisticated area of research that leverages computational modelling, objective measures of language, and extensive empirical rigor. The links between a person’s mental processes and the words...
Article
Full-text available
Throughout history, scholars and laypeople alike have believed that our words contain subtle clues about what we are like as people, psychologically speaking. However, the ways in which language has been used to infer psychological processes has seen dramatic shifts over time and, with modern computational technologies and digital data sources, we...
Article
Full-text available
The huge power for social influence of digital media may come with the risk of intensifying common societal biases, such as gender and age stereotypes. Speaker’s gender and age also behaviorally manifest in language use, and language may be a powerful tool to shape impact. The present study took the example of TED, a highly successful knowledge dis...
Article
The unique ways in which people use language can reveal a great deal about their personality. Research has found language to be a valid and reliable mode of measuring and understanding personality, and various methods of analysis allow researchers to explore how personality is encoded in the way that people use language.
Article
Full-text available
To date we know little about natural emotion word repertoires, and whether or how they are associated with emotional functioning. Principles from linguistics suggest that the richness or diversity of individuals' actively used emotion vocabularies may correspond with their typical emotion experiences. The current investigation measures active emoti...
Chapter
Full-text available
The unique ways in which people use language can reveal a great deal about their personality. Research has found language to be a valid and reliable mode of measuring and understanding personality, and various methods of analysis allow researchers to explore how personality is encoded in the way that people use language.
Article
Full-text available
Scholars across disciplines have long debated the existence of a common structure that underlies narratives. Using computer-based language analysis methods, several structural and psychological categories of language were measured across ~40,000 traditional narratives (e.g., novels and movie scripts) and ~20,000 nontraditional narratives (science r...
Data
This is the 1068-word Personal Value Dictionary and Supplemental Information for the article: Ponizovskiy, V., Ardag, M. M., Grigoryan, L., Boyd, R., Dobewall, H., & Holtz, P. (2020). Development and validation of the Personal Values Dictionary: A theory-driven tool for investigating references to basic human values in text. European Journal of Pe...
Article
Full-text available
Estimating psychological constructs from natural language has the potential to expand the reach and applicability of personality science. Research on the Big Five has produced methods to reliably assess personality traits from text, but the development of comparable tools for personal values is still in the early stages. Based on the Schwartz theor...
Article
Personality psychology has long been grounded in data typologies, particularly in the delineation of behavioural, life outcome, informant-report, and self-report sources of data from one another. Such data typologies are becoming obsolete in the face of new methods, technologies, and data philosophies. In this article, we discuss personality psycho...
Preprint
Full-text available
It is often assumed that people who use rich emotional vocabularies are emotionally healthier than those who express themselves using a narrower range of emotion words. However, the relevant research relies on passive presentation of experimenter-generated emotion words. To date we know little about natural emotion word repertoires, and whether or...
Data
Poster available from here: https://osf.io/h8ypt/
Article
Background: To help shed light on the peculiar circumstances surrounding the death of the famed macabre and mystery writer, poet, editor, and literary critic, we explored the potential role of depression in the life and death of Edgar Allan Poe via his written language. Method: Using computerized language analysis, we analyzed works from Poe’s co...
Article
Full-text available
On 11 February 2015, a 20-year-old university student, Ozgecan Aslan, was violently murdered in an attempted rape in Mersin, southern Turkey. This event led to a mass Twitter protest in the country. Women across the country started sharing the hashtag #sendeanlat (“#tellyourstory” in English). In the current exploratory study, 164,279 original twee...
Preprint
Full-text available
Do in-class discussion groups lead to improved learning for individual group members? Analyses of over 1600 students’ language samples from 4800+ online discussion groups revealed that markers of linguistic engagement were highly predictive of academic outcomes.
Article
There are several domains that are ripe for scientists to begin comparing notes and piecing together a uniform, coherent perspective on how generalized motivational systems emerge, function, and are shaped by their inputs. Becker and Neuberg repeatedly raise language learning and acquisition as an important exemplar that is simultaneously reflectiv...
Article
Full-text available
Low resting heart rate variability (HRV) has been associated with poor sexual arousal function in women. In a recent study, a single session of autogenic training increased HRV and facilitated improvements in both sexual arousal and perceived genital sensations among women experiencing decreased arousal. The current study expands upon these finding...
Article
Full-text available
Psychologists have long believed that we can discern what makes a person tick by analysing their language. The modern study of language has become a highly sophisticated area of research that leverages computational modelling, objective measures of language, and extensive empirical rigor. The links between a person’s mental processes and the words...
Article
Full-text available
College students’ study strategies were explored by tracking the ways they navigated the websites of two large (Ns of 1384 and 671) online introductory psychology courses. Students’ study patterns were measured analyzing the ways they clicked outside of the regularly scheduled class on study materials within the online Learning Management System. T...
Data
Time-based component loadings. (DOCX)
Data
Correlations between overall clicking and demographic variables. (DOCX)
Data
Base rates and factor loadings for click location. (DOCX)
Data
Regression table for SAT and overall clicking as predictors of grade. (DOCX)
Data
Correlations with overall clicks SAT and grade. (DOCX)
Preprint
Full-text available
In this manual, we introduce a new version of the German adaptation of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), called the DE-LIWC2015. The aim of the present work was to develop an update to the previous version of the German LIWC adaptation (Wolf et al., 2008) that corresponds to the LIWC2015 properties. The overall goal was to enable automa...
Article
Significance Donald Trump and a small group of emerging leaders around the world have been labeled as outliers in the ways that they think and communicate with others. Are they really anomalies, or do they fit into larger political trends? This study adds to existing scholarship by analyzing two important psychological dimensions, analytic thinking...
Data
Supplementary Information for: Jordan, K. N., Sterling, J., Pennebaker, J. W., & Boyd, R. L. (2019). Examining long-term trends in politics and culture through language of political leaders and cultural institutions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201811987. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1811987116
Article
Full-text available
Four studies developed and validated two dictionaries to capture agentic and communal expressions in natural language. Their development followed the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) approach (Study 1) and we tested their validity with frequency‐based analyses and semantic similarity measures. The newly developed Agency and Communion dictio...
Preprint
Full-text available
Converging investigations on the part of multiple agencies/agents have provided overwhelming evidence for Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As a part (and consequence) of recent reports, multiple datasets that capture actions taken by actors of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), have been released to the public. In the c...
Article
Full-text available
Many individuals who experience nonconsensual sexual experiences (NSEs) do not identify their experiences with common sexual violence labels (e.g., sexual assault, rape, or abuse), and cognitive mechanisms of identification have yet to be examined. Identification may involve the integration of the experience into sexual self-schemas, which would ha...
Article
Full-text available
Modern authorship attribution methods are often comprised of powerful yet opaque machine learning algorithms. While much of this work lends itself to concrete outcomes in the form of probability scores, advanced approaches typically preclude deeper insights in the form of psychological interpretation. Additionally, few attribution methods exist for...
Data
Additional information, discussions, and clarification regarding the mental profile mapping approach. (PDF)
Data
Descriptive statistics of the underlying LIWC measures for each playwright’s corpus. (TXT)
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Parkour is a relatively new discipline. As an uncommon nexus between risk, resistance, and the philosophy of overcoming obstacles, it is continuously gaining interest and popularity. However, the "voice" of parkour practitioners has been explored only qualitatively, on small samples and from a phenomenological point of view. In this work, raw data...
Article
Full-text available
This exploratory study examined the ways in which people communicate about food online by analyzing food-related conversations on Reddit, a social news networking site. The Meaning Extraction Helper (MEH) was used to analyze 2 corpora and define central themes related to online food talk. In light of these themes, the researchers discuss socio-cult...
Method
https://www.ryanboyd.io/software/meh/