The Grammar of Social Relations Lab (GSR Lab) is a joint initiative of Caterina Suitner (Specolab, Padova University, Italy) and Magdalena Formanowicz (Social Grammar Lab, SWPS University, Warsaw, Poland), stemming from the shared interest in social cognition and language and their role in shaping the understanding of social reality. We also have a common perspective on the value of respectful collaboration in science, that allows creativity to blossom while at the same time maintaining scientific rigour allowing full reproducibility. Driven by these shared interests and values, we established a joint lab that gathers our collaborators to fuel our projects with a common interdisciplinary and international perspective. Our goal is to share with the scientific community a collaboration style that merges the goal of high-quality research, with both social relevance and researchers’ wellbeing. Have a look at our projects!
Newsfeed
- New Article Alert: A new study from the Grammar of Social Relations Lab, published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, investigates how the grammatical class of stimuli dynamically influences human behavior.The article, “At the Speed of a Verb: Grammatical Class of Stimuli Affects Response Time in Surveys and Syntactic Classification Tasks” by Marta Witkowska and colleagues, demonstrates that grammar shapes cognitive processing not only through semantic meaning, but through the action-related associations embedded in grammatical form itself. Across four experiments conducted in Italian and Polish,… Read more: New Article Alert: A new study from the Grammar of Social Relations Lab, published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, investigates how the grammatical class of stimuli dynamically influences human behavior.
- We are pleased to share a new article published by the Grammar of Social Relations Lab in Depression and Anxiety: “The Semantics of depression: How linguistic agency patterns signal depressive symptoms on social media.”In this work, Marta Witkowska and colleagues examine whether subtle patterns of semantic agency in everyday language can reveal underlying psychological distress. Across two studies, the research team analyzed large-scale social media data from Twitter/X and Reddit, combining machine learning-based topic detection with established linguistic markers and expert coding. Their findings reveal that posts related… Read more: We are pleased to share a new article published by the Grammar of Social Relations Lab in Depression and Anxiety: “The Semantics of depression: How linguistic agency patterns signal depressive symptoms on social media.”
- A new article is available to read: “Words without power: Reduced semantic (but not grammatical) agency signals low mood and self-esteem.”Published in Journal of Affective Disorders, this article by Marta Beneda, Joachim Kowalski, and Marta Witkowska examines whether the language people use can reveal subtle signs of mood and self-related difficulties. Across two preregistered studies with 587 participants, the research shows that lower mood and lower self-esteem are associated with reduced use of semantic agency… Read more: A new article is available to read: “Words without power: Reduced semantic (but not grammatical) agency signals low mood and self-esteem.”