ArticleBehavior research methods2023
Quantifying social semantics: An inclusive definition of socialness and ratings for 8388 English words.
Article in Behavior research methods, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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35 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Distinguishing abstraction from abstractness: Specificity norms for 8,500 English words.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- How well do large language models mirror human cognition of word concepts?: A comparison of psychological ratings for early-acquired English words.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Emotional and Social Dimension of Abstract Concepts Meet with Interoception in Right Anterior Insula.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Influence of Social Word Features on Early Word Learning in Autistic and Non-Autistic Children.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- SocioLex-CZ: Normative estimates for socio-semantic dimensions of meaning for 2,999 words and 1,000 images.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Contextual assembly of lexical functions in large language models.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Large-Scale Social Feedback and Language Usage: a Distributional Analysis.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Abstract words are hard to acquire; Does social relevance help?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Contrasting the organization of concrete and abstract word meanings.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Reward as a facet of word meaning: Ratings of motivation for 8,601 English words.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Social Isolation of Horses vs. Support Provided by a Human.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- The Relationship Between Community Size and Iconicity in Sign Languages.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Cognition ratings for 8826 english words.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- English verbs semantic norms database: Concreteness, embodiment, imageability, valence and arousal ratings for 3,500 verbs.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Quantifying the Multidimensionality of Abstract Concepts: An Italian Database.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- The Flexible Role of Social Experience in the Processing of Abstract Concepts.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- What we mean when we say semantic: Toward a multidisciplinary semantic glossary.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
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3 authors.
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Abstract
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 8000 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 in both 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.
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