Undergraduate Course: Natural Language Processing for Psychologists (PSYL10186)

Course Outline
School	School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences	College	College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Credit level (Normal year taken)	SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate)	Availability	Not available to visiting students
SCQF Credits	20	ECTS Credits	10
Summary	A primer on natural language processing and machine learning techniques that are now being used in the study of human behaviour in online environments.
Course description	Psychologists are now using natural language processing tools, including language models, to study human behaviour on social media websites or in other naturally occurring corpora. How do we collect and analyse this sort of data and what is its value for understanding the mind and behaviour? This course covers how to use and evaluate psychological research that relies on the tools of natural language processing.

Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites	Students MUST have passed: Psychology 2A (PSYL08011) AND Psychology 2B (PSYL08012)	Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations		Other requirements	Psychology Honours courses are strictly only available to students in Y3 or Y4 of a Single or Joint Honours Degree in Psychology, Cognitive Science students, or medical students who are intercalating at Psychology. Visiting undergraduate students should check with the Visiting Student Office.

Course Delivery Information

Academic year 2025/26, Not available to visiting students (SS1)		Quota: 0
Course Start	Semester 1
Timetable	Timetable
Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info)	Total Hours: 200 ( Lecture Hours 10, Seminar/Tutorial Hours 10, Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4, Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours 176 )
Assessment (Further Info)	Written Exam 0 %, Coursework 100 %, Practical Exam 0 %
Additional Information (Assessment)	Assessment 1 - Project Proposal 30% (1000 words)«br /» Assessment 2 - Project 70% (2000 words)
Feedback	N/A
No Exam Information

Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to: Critically examine research that uses social media data to study psychological questions. Write R scripts to scrape social media data to gain direct experience of how this data is acquired to evaluate it critically. Generate testable hypotheses that might be answered using natural language processing techniques. Consider the ethical implications of research based on mining social media data and articulate how the project is compatible with the British Psychological Science Code of Ethics. Consider the broader application of these newly emerging tools for understanding psychology.