Background and scientific motivation
From specialist terminology to everyday usage
Medical and psychological terms increasingly occur outside specialist settings. A term can retain a clinical meaning while acquiring additional everyday uses, including metaphorical and broadened interpretations. For example, depressed can refer to a transient low mood in ordinary conversation without necessarily expressing its psychiatric definition.
These differences cannot be described only in terms of reference. Everyday uses may also differ in perceived severity, emotional valence, or arousal. MindShift therefore investigates denotational and connotational variation jointly, at the level of contextualized word usages.
Concept expansion and human perspectives
The project draws on research into lexical semantic change and psychological concept creep: the expansion of harm-related concepts to cover new phenomena or less severe cases. It examines how people with different experiences interpret the same terminology, including comparisons involving self-reported lived experience of mental illness.
The research does not assume that a word has a single stable everyday meaning or that clinical definitions alone are sufficient to characterize speakers’ intended meanings.
Relevance to human–AI interaction
Language models are used in contexts that involve self-reflection and informal mental-health support. A system may over-pathologize an ordinary expression or under-recognize distress communicated through everyday language. MindShift investigates these risks through human-grounded evaluation rather than treating the presence of psychiatric vocabulary as a direct proxy for distress.