The development of developmental psychology.

A corpus analysis of highly cited abstracts from 1970 to 2010

Caspar Addyman*,1,2 and Tessa Dekker1

Top 100 most frequent terms per decade Frequent phrases

Background
1970’s
What can data-mining tools and techniques tell us about the history of Moral judgment, Individual Secure attachment, Emotional
developmental psychology? Can a textual analysis of highly-cited abstracts differences, Age change, Mother regulation, Effortful control, Child
from PsychINFO reveal trends and themes? father, Cognitive development, behavior, Child learning, Executive
Sex differences, Age difference, function, Phonological awareness,
Methods Social behavior Theory of Mind, Phonemic
awareness, Short-term memory

PsychINFO 4 decades for 3 journals (approx 12,000 papers)

Child Development, Developmental Psychology, 1970’s 2000’s
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
12 most highly cited papers each year. 360 per decade.

1980’s Hierarchical cluster analysis

Extract & filter data from html using Python.
1970’s
less freq. more freq.
Using the R statistical computing language and
textual analysis packages tm [1,2] and RWeka [3] learning (-73) maternal (+101)
female (-57) adolescents (+150)
sex (-42) environment (+159)
stimuli (-32) expressions (+189)
preference (-29) classification (+248)

Correlated terms new family, memories, emotional

Identified, attributes
2000’s
1970’s 1980’s 1990’s 2000’s

child
1990’s

less freq. more freq.

conditions (-38) reported (+83)
infant observed (-31) theories (+110) Principle components analysis
patterns (-31) gender (+137)
discussed (-30) beliefs (+285)
increased (-27) adjustment (+287) behavior infant
parent infant Experiment
familiar
1970’s mother visual
stage observe
developmentmother
scale
addition
girl discrimin
mother new boy months-old grader stimuli
months-old evidence individual
… … result
… reliable
… …
2000’s
behavior phonologicaladult
more freq. read regulate child
less freq. experiment executive
rate (-44) research (+56) 2000’s task infant
child
emotion
mathematics belief
boys (-38) months (+79) memory suggest achievement mathematics
ability extermal academic
interaction (-36) american (+92) previous task
… control years-old
affect (-29) authors (+122) … theory
…
develop response (-25) yearolds (+182) … …

new
*Correspondence email c.addyman@bbk.ac.uk
1. Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development (CBCD), Birkbeck,
University of London, Malet Street, London,UK
2. Laboratoire d’Etudes sur l’Apprentissage et Développement
(LEAD), Pôle AAFE, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France
participants, indicated,condition,
activities, environmental
References
1.  Ingo Feinerer (2010). tm: Text Mining Package. R package version 0.5-3.
2.  Ingo Feinerer, Kurt Hornik, and David Meyer (2008). Text Mining Infrastructure
in R. Journal of Statistical Software 25/5. URL: http://www.jstatsoft.org/v25/i05/.
3.  Mark Hall, Eibe Frank, Geoffrey Holmes, Bernhard Pfahringer, Peter
Reutemann, Ian H. Witten (2009); The WEKA Data Mining Software: An Update;
SIGKDD Explorations, Volume 11, Issue 1