Diachronic semantic changes of constructs in Japanese psychology: Focusing on contextual changes in psychological terms in the Japanese Journal of Psychology

Psychology aims to establish universal theories of the mind. However, a growing number of studies have demonstrated that psychological constructs, which constitute theories, are susceptible to cultural variability. This may threaten the aim of psychology. Few studies have investigated temporal variability in constructs likely to underlie current cultural variability. This study explored diachronic semantic changes of constructs in contemporary psychology in Japan using Infinite SCAN, a natural language processing technique, to estimate the number of contexts in which psychological terms representing constructs occur and changes in the proportion of those contexts across periods. The target corpora were obtained from the main texts of the articles published in the Japanese Journal of Psychology between 1974 and 2023. The results revealed that contexts of the terms have changed over the past 50 years. According to distributional semantics, the contextual changes in the psychological terms represent the semantic changes in the constructs. The diachronic semantic changes of constructs should be considered in psychological research and practice.