Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemExpanding online education frontiers - needs, opportunities and examples(Nova Science, 2022)The Future of Online Education provides a vision of a fully successful online education future and practical ways to best turn this vision into a reality, and benefit from it, for online education decision makers, designers, educators and students. The book provides emerging online education knowledge, perspectives, issues and opportunities, and integrates these with practical ways for online education providers and recipients to fully benefit from their great new opportunities. The book is a valuable guide to achieving the best possible online education future and will comprehensively support online education development and implementation across courses and institutions. The Future of Online Education also provides a unique coming together of online education expert perspectives, ideas, examples and resources that will inform, inspire and support a whole-hearted entering into and advancing of our emerging online education world.
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ItemCulture and Intergroup Relations(Guilford Press, 2021-10-01)
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ItemSemantic changes in harm-related concepts in English(Language Science Press, 2021-06-29)The chapter investigates semantic changes in core concepts of psychology, specifically focusing on those related to harm. Haslam (2016) hypothesized that many psychological concepts associated with harm (i.e., forms of psychological disturbance, threat, and maltreatment) have undergone semantic broadening in the past half-century in association with cultural shifts and social change. The implications of this “concept creep” hypothesis have been previously explored by prominent social, political, and legal thinkers (Levari et al. 2018, Lukianoff & Haidt 2019, Pinker 2018, Sunstein 2018), but its linguistic dimension has received little empirical attention. Here we apply computational models in order to address the concept creep hypothesis. We start with a description of a typology of semantic shifts and provide a summary of computational methods for automatic detection of the most common changes (broadening, narrowing, hyperbole, and litotes) and utilise those to evaluate core harm-related concepts such as ‘trauma’, ‘harassment’, and ‘bullying’ on a new corpus of psychology literature extending from 1970 to 2017. Our results confirm the initial hypothesis and are in line with earlier studies: most concepts became broader and milder over the last few decades. We then continue with a more detailed study in order to understand how exactly the concepts changed, and to do so employ and evaluate different types of semantic representations. Finally, we additionally train the models on a general domain corpus in order to investigate whether the broadening of harm-related concepts also applies to society at large, rather than only to the academic discourse of psychology. Haslam’s influential account of concept creep (Haslam 2016) proposes that broadened concepts of harm disseminate from academic language into wider public use. This final analysis enables a direct test of that conjecture, including comparative analysis of the extent and timing of historical semantic changes across the two corpora.