Semantic Shifts of Psychological Concepts in Scientific and Popular Media Discourse: A Distributional Semantics Analysis of Russian-Language Corpora

TL;DR

This study analyzes how psychological concepts like burnout and depression are semantically represented differently in Russian scientific versus popular media, revealing shifts from technical to experiential framing.

Contribution

It applies distributional semantics to Russian corpora to identify semantic shifts of psychological concepts across media types, highlighting differences in vocabulary and conceptual framing.

Findings

Scientific discourse emphasizes methodology and diagnosis.

Popular science focuses on personal narratives and emotions.

Semantic associations differ significantly between discourse types.

Abstract

This article examines semantic shifts in psychological concepts across scientific and popular media discourse using methods of distributional semantics applied to Russian-language corpora. Two corpora were compiled: a scientific corpus of approximately 300 research articles from the journals Psychology. Journal of the Higher School of Economics and Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Psychology (767,543 tokens) and a popular science corpus consisting of texts from the online psychology platforms Yasno and Chistye kogntsii (1,199,150 tokens). After preprocessing (OCR recognition, lemmatization, removal of stop words and non-informative characters), the corpora were analyzed through frequency analysis, clustering, and the identification of semantic associations. The results reveal significant differences in vocabulary and conceptual framing between the two discourse types: scientific texts emphasize methodological and clinical terminology, while popular science materials foreground everyday experience and therapeutic practice. A comparison of semantic associations for key concepts such as burnout and depression shows that scientific discourse links these terms to psychological resources, symptomatology, and diagnostic constructs, whereas popular science discourse frames them through personal narratives, emotions, and everyday situations. These findings demonstrate a clear shift from precise professional terminology toward more generalized and experiential meanings in popular media discourse and confirm the effectiveness of distributional semantics methods for identifying semantic transformations of psychological concepts across different communicative contexts.