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

单词如何有意义（词汇语义）是人类思维中最不为人所知的功能之一，也是少数几个基本心理功能之一，无法轻易从非人类动物的比较研究中获益，因为没有其他动物像人类那样使用语言。我的研究重点是帮助认知科学理解词义是一个基本的生物过程，它与其他基本的跨物种生物过程有关，如接近和回避行为、情绪处理、学习和模式识别。理解词义之所以具有挑战性，原因有很多，其中包括神经心理学和脑成像证据都表明，大脑并没有将词义视为一件事。我们已经知道，计算单词的意思需要使用许多不同的大脑区域，并且在脑损伤后，它会以许多不同的方式分解。词汇语义科学研究的一个方法论问题是，许多研究都依赖于人类对意义的判断，将其作为“解释变量”，用于科学解释。与其依赖这些判断作为解释，不如解释这些判断背后的心理过程。这就是我想做的。我使用一种计算方法从大量人工生成的文本语料库中提取有关词义的信息。我的研究重点是提取与单词相关的情感信息，以及理解情感信息如何影响人类对单词及其含义的理解。我使用了实验和脑成像方法的结合，并分析了用于从文本中提取单词含义的计算机算法。

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.