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Humans have been using language for millennia but have only just begun to scratch the surface of what natural language can reveal about the mind. Here we propose that language offers a unique window into psychology. After briefly summarizing the legacy of language analyses in psychological science, we show how methodological advances have made these analyses more feasible and insightful than ever before. In particular, we describe how two forms of language analysis-natural-language processing and comparative linguistics-are contributing to how we understand topics as diverse as emotion, creativity, and religion and overcoming obstacles related to statistical power and culturally diverse samples. We summarize resources for learning both of these methods and highlight the best way to combine language analysis with more traditional psychological paradigms. Applying language analysis to large-scale and cross-cultural datasets promises to provide major breakthroughs in psychological science.

There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field's investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women's career advancement in psychological science. We focus on issues that have been the subject of empirical study, discuss relevant evidence within and outside of psychological science, and draw on established psychological theory and social-science research to begin to chart a path forward. We hope that better understanding of these issues within the field will shed light on areas of existing gender gaps in the discipline and areas where positive change has happened, and spark conversation within our field about how to create lasting change to mitigate remaining gender differences in psychological science.

Language can certainly communicate emotions, but growing research suggests that language also helps constitute emotion by cohering sensations into specific perceptions of "anger," "disgust," "fear," etc. The powerful role of language in emotion is predicted by a constructionist approach, which suggests that emotions occur when sensations are categorized using emotion category knowledge supported by language. We discuss the accumulating evidence from social cognitive, neuropsychological, cross-cultural, and neuroimaging studies that emotion words go beyond communication to help constitute emotional perceptions, and perhaps even emotional experiences. We look forward to current directions in research on emotional intelligence, emotion regulation, and psychotherapy.

This study examined the hypothesis that emotion is a psychological event constructed from the more basic elements of core affect and conceptual knowledge. Participants were primed with conceptual knowledge of fear, conceptual knowledge of anger, or a neutral prime and then proceeded through an affect-induction procedure designed to induce unpleasant, high-arousal affect or a neutral affective state. As predicted, only those individuals for whom conceptual knowledge of fear had been primed experienced unpleasant core affect as evidence that the world was threatening. This study provides the first experimental support for the hypothesis that people experience world-focused emotion when they conceptualize their core affective state using accessible knowledge about emotion.

For almost 5 decades, the scientific study of emotion has been guided by the assumption that categories such as anger, sadness, and fear cut nature at its joints. Barrett (2006a) provided a comprehensive review of the empirical evidence from the study of emotion in humans and concluded that this assumption has outlived its usefulness. Panksepp and Izard have written lengthy papers (published in this issue) containing complementary but largely nonover lapping criticisms of Barrett (2006a). In our response, we address three of their concerns. First, we discuss the value of correlational versus experimental studies for evaluating the natural-kind model of emotion and refute the claim that the evidence offered in Barrett (2006a) was merely correlational. Second, we take up the issue of whether or not there is evidence for "coherently organized neural circuits for natural kinds of emotions in the mammalian brain and counter the claim that Barrett (2006a) ignored crucial evidence for existence of discrete emotions as natural kinds. Third, we address Panksepp and Izard's misconceptions of an alternative view, the conceptual act model of emotion, that was briefly discussed in Barrett (2006a). Finally, we end the article with some thoughts on how to move the scientific study of emotion beyond the debate over whether or not emotions are natural kinds., (© 2007 Association for Psychological Science.)