The Neuroscientification of Psychology: The Rising Prevalence of Neuroscientific Concepts in Psychology From 1965 to 2016

Abstract

The apparent convergence of psychology and brain science has been the subject of both celebration and critique, but it has never been systematically charted. We examined historical trends in the representation of neuroscientific concepts in a corpus of 798,402 psychology journal articles published over the past half century, from 1965 to 2016. A dictionary of 522 uniquely neuroscience-related terms was developed, and the percentage of article abstracts in which at least one term appeared was calculated for each year. This percentage grew from 9.15% to 16.45% over the study period, whereas the percentage containing a subset of 199 terms containing the prefix “neur-” rose much more steeply, fr..