Ryan L. Boyd

University of Texas at Dallas | UTD · Psychology

Psychological researchers are increasingly striving to enhance methodological integrity, including in qualitative methods. Although computerized text analysis tools originally emerged as a potential replacement for manual coding approaches, recent studies have underscored the unique yet complementary value of employing several methods. The current...

Use of large language models such as ChatGPT (GPT-4) for mental health support has grown rapidly, emerging as a promising route to assess and help people with mood disorders, like depression. However, we have a limited understanding of GPT-4's schema of mental disorders, that is, how it internally associates and interprets symptoms. In this work, w...

Self-reported rating scales have been central to social science for decades, even though language is our primary form of communication. We used language analysis with machine learning to compare self-reported ratings with language-based responses of experienced well-being (i.e., daily emotions) linked with human traits, states, and behaviors. In a...

Objective: Employing automated language analysis, specifically Meaning Extraction Method (MEM) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA), to identify key factors in open-text responses about hearing aid experiences. Design: Exploratory, cross-sectional design, using an online questionnaire. Responses to a single open-ended question were analysed us...

The ways people use language can reveal clues to their emotions, social behaviours, thinking styles, cultures and the worlds around them. In the past two decades, research at the intersection of social psychology and computer science has been developing tools to analyse natural language from written or spoken text to better understand social proces...

BACKGROUND: Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shown promise in identifyingpsychopathology based on the language used by patients, providing a scalable method forobtaining relevant behavioral markers. However, no existing models for assessing posttraumaticstress disorder (PTSD) have successfully demonstrated out-of-sample replicability. We dev...

Using social media data, the present study documents how three successive upheavals: the COVID pandemic, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests of 2020, and the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 interacted to impact the cognitive, emotional, and social styles of people in the US. Text analyses were conducted on 45,225,895 Red...

Aimed at the NLP researchers or practitioners who would like to integrate human - individual, group, or societal level factors into their analyses, this tutorial will cover recent techniques and libraries for doing so at each level of analysis. Starting with human-centered techniques that provide benefit to traditional document- or word-level NLP t...

Natural language processing (NLP)—previously the domain of a select few language and computer scientists—is undergoing an unprecedented surge in popularity across disciplines. The ubiquity of language data, alongside extremely rapid methodological innovations, has magnetized the field, attracting researchers with the promise of measuring, forecasti...

The social sciences have long relied on comparative work as the foundation upon which we understand the complexities of human behavior and society. However, as we go deeper into the era of artificial intelligence (AI), it becomes imperative to move beyond mere comparison (e.g., how AI compares to humans across a range of tasks) to establish a visio...

Psychological risk factors for suicide have been extensively studied for decades. However, combining explainable theory with modern data-driven language modeling approaches is non-trivial. Here, we propose and evaluate methods for identifying language patterns indicative of suicide risk by combining theory-driven suicidal archetypes with language m...

The social sciences have long relied on comparative work as the foundation upon which we understand the complexities of human behavior and society. However, as we delve deeper into the era of artificial intelligence (AI), it becomes imperative to move beyond mere comparison (e.g., how AI compares to humans across a range of tasks) to establish a vi...

Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) assesses the perceived impact of health status across life domains. Although research has explored the relationship between specific conditions, including HIV, and HRQoL in low-resource settings, less attention has been paid to the association between multimorbidity and HRQoL. In a secondary analysis of cross-...

This research explores the intricate realm of nostalgia, employing advanced language analysis and the Event Reflection Task to systematically dissect the process of nostalgic recall. Through this methodological approach, distinct thematic elements are identified across 10 data sets (N = 2,038). Eight recurrent topics in nostalgic content are unveil...

The COVID-19 pandemic posed a global threat to nearly every society around the world. Individuals turned to their political leaders to safely guide them through this crisis. The most direct way political leaders communicated with their citizens was through official speeches and press conferences. In this report, we compare psychological language ma...

The role of linguistic analysis in understanding human behaviour, emotions, and psychological states has gained significant prominence in various domains, including psychology, social sciences, and computational linguistics. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a widely used tool, developed by American social psychologist James W. Penneb...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Poster available from here: https://osf.io/h8ypt/

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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