The semantic inflation of “trauma” in psychology

Q2 Arts and Humanities
Naomi Baes, Ekaterina Vylomova, M. Zyphur, N. Haslam
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引用次数: 3

Abstract

Abstract Trauma is an increasingly prominent concept in psychology and society at large. According to the theory of concept creep, it is one of several harm-related concepts that have undergone semantic inflation in recent decades, expanding to encompass new kinds of phenomena (horizontal expansion) and less severe phenomena (vertical expansion). Previous research has demonstrated that “trauma” has come to be used in a widening range of semantic contexts, implying horizontal expansion, but has not investigated vertical expansion. The present study developed a methodology for evaluating vertical expansion and implemented it using an English-language corpus of 825,628 scientific psychology article abstracts from 1970 to 2017. Findings indicate that “trauma” has come to be used in less severe contexts, and this trend may be linked to its rising frequency of use. These findings support the predictions of the concept creep theory and provide a new method for investigating the language dynamics of harm-related concepts.
心理学中“创伤”的语义膨胀
摘要创伤是心理学和社会中一个日益突出的概念。根据概念蠕变理论,它是近几十年来经历语义膨胀的几个与伤害相关的概念之一,扩展到包括新的现象(水平扩展)和不太严重的现象(垂直扩展)。先前的研究表明,“创伤”已经在越来越多的语义上下文中使用,意味着横向扩展,但没有研究纵向扩展。本研究开发了一种评估纵向扩展的方法,并使用1970年至2017年825628篇科学心理学文章摘要的英语语料库进行了实施。研究结果表明,“创伤”已经在不太严重的情况下使用,这一趋势可能与其使用频率的上升有关。这些发现支持了概念蠕变理论的预测,并为研究伤害相关概念的语言动力学提供了一种新的方法。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Psychology of Language and Communication
Psychology of Language and Communication Arts and Humanities-Language and Linguistics
CiteScore
0.80
自引率
0.00%
发文量
11
审稿时长
14 weeks
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