Evaluation of Semantic Change of Harm-Related Concepts in Psychology

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.