Semantic changes in harm-related concepts in English

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 atten-
tion.
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.