Quantifying Social Semantics: An Inclusive Definition of Socialness and Ratings for 8,388 English Words

It has been proposed that social experience plays an important role in the grounding of concepts, and socialness has been proffered as a fundamental organisational principle underpinning semantic representation in the human brain. However, the empirical support for these hypotheses is limited by inconsistencies in the way socialness has been defined and measured. To further advance theory, the field must establish a clearer working definition, and research efforts could be facilitated by the availability of an extensive set of socialness ratings for individual concepts. Therefore, in the current work we employed a novel and inclusive definition to test the extent to which socialness is reliably perceived as a broad construct, and we report socialness norms for over 8,000 English words, including nouns, verbs and adjectives. Our inclusive socialness measure shows good reliability and validity, and our analyses suggest that the socialness ratings capture aspects of word meaning which are distinct to those measured by other pertinent semantic constructs, including concreteness and emotional valence. Finally, in a series of regression analyses, we show for the first time that the socialness of a word's meaning explains unique variance in participant performance on lexical tasks. Our dataset of socialness norms has considerable item overlap with those used both in other lexical/semantic norms and in available behavioural mega-studies. They can help target testable predictions about brain and behaviour derived from multiple representation theories and neurobiological accounts of social semantics.

Attitude to Immigrants in the Mass Consciousness of Europeans (using the example of secondary analysis of ESS 2016 data). Part 2

In the second part of the article, the problem of positioning in the space of society ten clusters obtained in the study of European countries in 2016 is solved. The internal structure of clusters is considered by combining the patterns of deviations in the vectors of estimates of immigration, depending on the social characteristics of the carriers of these estimates. For this purpose, the method of formalizing the series of frequency deviations by the Student’s criterion, dispersion, correlation, regression, entropy analyzes, the method of constructing decision trees, tested in previous works of the authors, have been applied. A feature of this approach is going beyond the boundaries of a narrow consideration of paired relationships of features. The direction and force of deviation from some points of the centers of a stable state of activity of mass behaviour and assessments of mass consciousness in the studied area is considered in a broad context of indicators. This makes it possible to construct two-dimensional landscape maps of the vectors of activity deviation and assessments in different clusters of countries presented in the first part of the article and makes it possible to arrive at ideas about the action of common factors of social semantics that determine both the unity and the variety of phenomena found in the ESS-2016 study.

Social Semantics: The role of conceptual knowledge and cognitive control in a neurobiological model of the social brain

Research in social neuroscience has primarily focused on carving up cognition into distinct pieces, as a function of mental process, neural network or social behaviour, while the need for unifying models that span multiple social phenomena has been relatively neglected. Here we present a novel framework that treats social cognition as a case of semantic cognition, which provides a neurobiologically constrained and generalizable framework, with clear, testable predictions regarding sociocognitive processing in the context of both health and disease. According to this framework, social cognition relies on two principal systems of representation and control. These systems are neuroanatomically and functionally distinct, but interact to (1) enable development of foundational, conceptual-level knowledge and (2) regulate access to this information in order to generate flexible and context-appropriate social behaviour. The Social Semantics framework shines new light on the mechanisms of social information processing by maintaining as much explanatory power as prior models of social cognition, whilst remaining simpler, by virtue of relying on fewer components that are “tuned” towards social interactions.

What Happened to Theatre Studies?

In this article, the recent development of theatre studies is outlined in order to suggest a way forward under the heading of “theatre studies 3.0.” A double thesis is defended. Firstly, it is argued that the development of theatre studies is marked by a simultaneous tendency towards pragmatization, theorization, and expansion. Secondly, it is shown that these three strands of development may be seen as reactions to a more fundamental threefold change of the social semantics: a decline of the tradition of edification, an insistence of convergence of the theoretically and the practically oriented programmesof education, and finally a loss of self-evident borders for disciplines. Having suggested what happened to theatre studies and why it happened, the article suggests that we follow a path called “theatre studies 3.0.” based on “an asymmetrical double strategy”.

Margaret Harkness, novelist: social semantics and experiments in fiction

This chapter is based on Harkness’s three London novels to explore how they provided a space in which she was able to experiment with a new style of literary realism designed to reflect both its historical moment and an evolving linguistic and political discourse. It argues that, in a period of social change, Harkness’s task in writing novels about contemporary social conditions required her to employ the shared language and conventions of the present but, crucially, to listen and hear the as yet unarticulated but evolving meanings of the future. It explores the ways in which Harkness’s writing participates in and contributes to emerging forms of experimental writing that seek to relay the experience of urban modernity.