A multi-disciplinary approach to understanding interactions between lexical and affective processing

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How words have meaning (lexical semantics) is one of the least understood functions of the human mind, and one of a handful of basic psychological functions that cannot easily benefit from comparative studies of non-human animals, since no other animals use language in the way that humans do. My research is focused on helping cognitive science understand word meaning as a basic biological process that is related to other basic cross-species biological processes such as approach and avoidance behavior, emotional processing, learning, and pattern recognition. There are many reasons why understanding word meaning is challenging, including the fact that neuropsychological and brain imaging evidence both suggest that the brain does not treat word meaning as one thing. We already know that computing word meaning uses many different brain regions and that it breaks down in a many different ways following brain damage. One methodological problem with the scientific study of lexical semantics is that much of has relied on human judgments of meaning as an 'explanatory variable', to be used in scientific explanations. Instead of relying on those judgments as explanations, it is better to explain what sort of psychological processes underlie those judgments. This is what I am trying to do. I use a computational method for extracting information about word meaning from a large corpus of human-generated text. My research focuses in particular on extracting information about emotions that are associated with words, and on understanding how that emotional information impacts on how humans access words and their meanings. I use a combination of experimental and brain imaging methods, as well as an analysis of the computer algorithms that are used to extract word meaning from text.