Psychological Constructs in Shared Semantic Space 文章

arXiv:2605.26801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Psychological constructs are often measured in separate instruments, datasets, and research traditions, which makes direct comparison difficult. This paper proposes a framework for making such constructs semantically commensurate by representing and comparing them as directions in a shared word-embedding space. Using Supervised Semantic Differential, we estimate construct-specific semantic gradients from text-outcome associations and project them onto theoretically motivated reference axes. As an initial test case, we use Valence, Arousal, and Dominance (VAD) as an affective coordinate system. First, we recover interpretable VAD directions from English word-level affective norms. Second, we project semantic gradients for 27 GoEmotions categories into this space and recover the expected organization of emotions, especially along valence and arousal.