Posts

Lecture: Adjusting to the Unexpected

Tickets available at the bottom


We’re excited to announce the second VSPA lecture of 2023: Adjusting to the Unexpected – How Text Data Help Us Understand Human Behaviour.

Research on the psychological costs of the COVID-19 pandemic is becoming increasingly
important. While most studies use questionnaire methods to measure emotional adjustments and
other psychological variables, we approached the problem through the lens of text data. This talk
will discuss what we learned from a panel dataset consisting of survey responses and rich
textual data from participants tracked over three years. The first part will show how clustering
techniques reveal hidden distinct types of emotional adjustment obscured by traditional analyses.

The second part touches on natural language processing techniques to study text data. We will
discuss recent findings obtained from AI language models that ask entirely new questions about
human verbal behaviour. The talk closes with a bigger picture of text data, AI models and human
psychology.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, interest has only increased in the question of how we emotionally adjust to large, unexpected changes like it. We look forward to welcoming Dr. Bennett Kleinberg, who will give us insight into current research on this topic, as well as the methods used to gain these insights. We will learn how the analysis of text data recovers patterns that traditional analyses might have missed, and how AI models allow us to ask entirely new questions about human behaviour.

We are happy to welcome you to REC on the 16th of February, where Dr. Kleinberg will introduce us to the topic of text data and artificial intelligence in human psychology. With your ticket, you will get access to the lecture hall as well as snacks. You will also receive a colloquium point for your attendance.

We hope to see you there!

Tickets can be purchased here:

Tickets for members

Tickets for non-members