Event construal and temporal distance in natural language

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Construal level theory posits that temporal distance influences psychological distance.
• Events closer in time are represented more concretely than distant events.

Purpose of the Study:

• To empirically test Construal Level Theory's predictions using large-scale text corpora.
• To investigate how language concreteness changes with temporal proximity to future events.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of Twitter posts referencing future dates.
• Examination of New York Times articles concerning U.S. presidential elections and public holidays.
• Quantitative linguistic analysis of word concreteness in relation to event temporal proximity.

Main Results:

• Tweets referencing proximate future dates used more concrete language than those referencing distant dates.
• New York Times articles showed increased language concreteness as U.S. presidential elections and holidays approached.
• The decrease in concreteness post-event was more pronounced than the increase pre-event.

Conclusions:

• Findings provide strong empirical support for Construal Level Theory.
• Large natural language datasets can effectively inform and test psychological theories.
• Temporal proximity significantly impacts linguistic representation of future events.