Expression of Meaning ‘Change’: A Discourse Dominant in German Psychological Journalism?

This article focuses on the discourse of German psychological journalism by reviewing works that conceptualize psychotherapeutic, scientific-psychological, and popular-psychological communication. It is hypothesized that nouns verbalizing change are characteristic of German-language psychological publications. These include terms denoting changes themselves as well as obstacles to change such as Veränderung, Entwicklung, Wandel, Transformation, Trauma, Krise, etc. To verify this hypothesis, a quantitative-discursive analysis was conducted using materials from the journal Psychologie Heute published between 2013 and 2025. Methods of computational linguistics were employed, specifically utilizing the corpus manager AntConc. From the total of 4,348,563 word tokens within the research corpus, all contexts including lexemes signifying change were extracted. The study demonstrated that these nouns do not rank among the most frequent words in the analyzed corpus. However, it also revealed significant discrepancies between their usage patterns in the studied corpus compared to a reference corpus. Special attention is given to context-semantic analyses of collocations with these selected lexical items. It is concluded that collocational patterns contribute to terminological precision and serve discussions related to current social issues in the field of German popular psychology.