Psychological & Brain Sciences 891CE - S-Computational Social Psych

This an advanced graduate-level seminar designed to explore the intersection of computational methods and social behavior. This course delves deeply into Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications for psychology, offering students the opportunity to understand and analyze complex patterns in human communication and large-scale textual data. By leveraging the power of NLP for psychology, students will learn to extract and interpret nuanced aspects of psychology from textual corpora, enabling a deeper understanding of human behavior ?in the wild.? This course also covers network science, examining how individuals connect and influence each other within various social structures (e.g., social media). Additionally, the course introduces agent-based models as a means to simulate and predict social behaviors. Students will engage in hands-on projects to model language, social ties, diffusion of information, and the emergence of social norms and structures. Through a blend of theoretical knowledge and cutting-edge computational methods, this course aims to equip students with the skills to conduct research in their area of interest using advanced computational techniques to uncover the hidden mechanics of social interactions and human behavior.

Open to Graduate Psychology majors only. PSYCH 640 or 643 Familiarity with R programming language is recommended.