Li, Ying

Check out our website (Macroscope) for historical meaning of words with a click of button --> http://www.macroscope.tech/

The words we use in our daily life reflects who we are, what we feel, and the social relationships we are in. This makes language a fertile ground for studying psychology. I am interested in how the language we produced reveals or shapes our mind. My research uses open-ended surveys, sizable linguistic corpora, network analysis and language models, with applications to the following projects:

Theme 1: Risk perception

• How has the perception of risk changed over the past two centuries?
• What events do people considered as risky and how they relate to each other?
• Developing a culturally-universal risk preference scale.

Theme 2: Emotion and wellbeing

• Developed a culturally-universal affect scale using free recall paradigm (Emotion Recall Task)
• How do children acquire emotion concepts?
• How do meanings of emotion words change over history?
• Whether forward-looking attitude predicts national wellbeing and economic prosperity?

Theme 3: Corpus linguistics

• What makes some words more likely to acquire new meanings than others?
• The role of psycholinguistic factors in information transmission.
• Modelling perception of conceptual metaphors.

Publication: 

• Li, Y^*., Engelthaler, T., Siew, C. S., & Hills, T. T. (2019). The Macroscope: A tool for examining the historical structure of language. Behavior research methods, 51(4), 1864-1877.https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1177-6 
• Li, Y^*., Masitah, A., & Hills, T. T. (2020). The Emotional Recall Task: Juxtaposing recall and recognition-based affect scales. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 46(9), 1782–1794. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000841
• Li, Y^*., Hills, T. T., & Hertwig, R. (2020). A brief history of risk. Cognition, 203, 104344. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104344 
• Li, Y^*., & Hills, T. T. (2021). Language patterns of outgroup prejudice. Cognition, 215, 104813. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104813
• Li, Y., Luan, S^*., Li, Y., & Hertwig, R. (2021). Changing emotions in the COVID-19 pandemic: A four-wave longitudinal study in the United States and China. Social Science & Medicine. 285, 114222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114222
• Li, Y., Luan, S^*., Li, Y., Wu, J., Li, W., & Hertwig, R. (2022). Does risk perception motivate preventive behavior during a pandemic? A longitudinal study in the United States and China. American Psychologist. American Psychologist, 77(1), 111-123. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000885
• Li, Y^*., Siew, C. S. (In press). Diachronic semantic change in language is constrained by how people use and learn language. Memory & Cognition.