Social/Personality Laboratory

• Professor Nick Haslam

  Director

  nhaslam@unimelb.edu.au
  +61 3 8344 6379

Research Overview

Our Laboratory currently focuses its efforts on the study of ‘concept creep, the semantic inflation of harm concepts. In collaboration with colleagues in computer science, we use natural language processing methods and social psychology experiments to evaluate how word meanings change and what the implications of these changes might be. In recent years we have paid most attention to the evolution of mental health-related concepts on news media and social media. We explore how and why their meanings have shifted and what the implications of these shifts may be for phenomena such as self-diagnosis, stigma, personal identity, and the mental health ‘crisis’.

In addition to our concept creep studies, we carry out projects on such varied topics as dehumanization, misogyny, prejudice, conflict in the psychotherapeutic relationship, the latent structure of mental illness, and the history of psychology.

Staff

Collaborators

University of California, Los Angeles

Funding

The research is currently supported by ARC Discovery Projects DP250102690 and DP260104296

Research Publications

For a full, regularly updated list of publications, see Google Scholar.