Frontiers in Psychology (Sep 2021)
Psycho-Linguistic Changes Associated With Historical Celebrities in Henan Using Classical Chinese Big Data
Abstract
Chinese civilization has a long history, and the Central Plains, with Henan as the core, is one of its birthplaces. Understanding the psycho-linguistic changes in Henan is of great significance for understanding the evolution and formation of national cultural psychology. The traditional method is mainly qualitative or speculative, which makes the consistency among the research results low. Moreover, because most of the research are conducted in a specific period or on a specific figure, they are relatively scattered and unsystematic. To systematically and quantitatively study the psychological changes in the Central Plains represented by Henan Province, this article aimed to examine the self-reported discourses of historical celebrities in Henan in official history and their psycho-linguistic changes based on the classical Chinese Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (classical Chinese LIWC, CC-LIWC) psycholinguistic dictionary and the classical Chinese words segmentation system, using big data. The research found that the frequency of male words in Henan historical celebrities (F = 2.938, p < 0.05), of differ words (F = 4.767, p < 0.01), of motion words (F = 4.042, p < 0.01), and of time words (F = 5.412, p < 0.01) are significantly different among the five dynasties. The conclusion is that during the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States periods, 100 schools of thought contended, and the status of “scholars” in Henan rose. The frequency of male and differ words was at that point significantly higher than during the other dynasties. From “The Contention of a Hundred Schools of Thought” to “The Supremacy of Confucianism,” the scholars in Henan were in decline, and differential cognitive tendencies had diminished since the Han dynasty. During the period of the Three Kingdoms and Jin and Southern and Northern Dynasties, political powers and territories changed, and the historical celebrities in Henan show a remarkable tendency that were related to time and space. The psycho-linguistic changes found in this study are highly consistent with the development of social history, which indicates that the guidance of the social, political, and cultural environment has an important influence on the psycho-linguistic changes of social class. This is the first time that the text analysis system has been applied in classical Chinese to carry out quantitative research on the psycho-linguistic changes of ancient Chinese people, which provides new ideas and new methods for humanistic research.
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