Faculty Sponsor: Jill Morawski
Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Professor Pavel Oleinikov
Erin Byrne
Erin Byrne is from Colorado and is double majoring in Psychology and Science in Society at Wesleyan University. She is also pursuing the Data Analysis Minor. She is in the class of 2024 and has previous research experience with the College of the Environment and the Community Health Center in Middletown, CT.
Abstract: “Boundaries” are a new topic to popular culture, which lacks a clear definition or definitive history. This research aims to compile the various histories of “boundaries” in order to answer the question: how has the psychological concept of “boundaries” transitioned over time into what it means today. Google Books data was used to identify books oriented around boundary-making. The ngrams show chronological relationships between relevant language and the popularity of use in the corpus of English language up until 2019. Historical research in psychology is limited, and the idea of boundaries is a popular one currently that has unclear origins. This research will establish boundaries as an important concept for psychological research and identify its conceptual origins. This way, future researchers can account for complications that this research identifies as being related to the development of “boundaries” of the self. The ngrams show that boundaries increase in usage in 1980 and a Latent Dirichlet Analysis of Psychology Today articles that mention the word boundaries reveals a wide range of topics that could be related to this increase in usage.
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