Program in Linguistics
Professor, Department of Psychology
Coordinator of the Joint Psychology and Linguistics Major

Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology
Northwestern University, 1999

OFFICE: Psychology Building, Rm 479
PHONE: 404-727-7140
EMAIL: pwolff@emory.edu

Professor Wolff has been an active member of the core faculty of the Program in Linguistics since 2004. His research focuses on language semantics and machine learning. Specific areas of interest include human decision-making, lexical semantics, and linguistic digital phenotyping of mental illness.

Professor Wolff has co-authored and edited three books, including one entitled Words and the World, which examines the interface of language and thought across languages. He has given invited talks in a number of countries, including Singapore, France, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, England, The Netherlands, Italy, and China. In addition to serving on several editorial boards, Dr. Wolff has served as director of the Linguistics Program at Emory, associate editor of the journal Cognitive Science and faculty at the 2007 Summer Institute of Linguistics at Stanford University.

Recent Publications

• Thorstad, R., & Wolff, P. (2019). Using big data to understand memory and future thinking. Proceedings of the 41th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1-6). Montreal, Canada. (PDF)
• Thorstad, R., & Wolff, P. (2019). Predicting future mental illness from social media: A big data approach. Behavior Research Methods. (URL)
• Rezaii, N., Walker, E., & Wolff, P. (2019). A machine learning approach to predicting psychosis using semantic density and latent content analysis. npj Shizophrenia - Nature. (URL)
• Thorstad, R., & Wolff, P. (2018). A big data analysis of the relationship between future thinking and decision-making. PNAS, 115 (8), E1740 – 1748. (PDF)

Websites:

Prof. Wolff's Psychology Faculty Page
and the Concept Mining Lab.

Courses taught in Linguistics

LING 309 Brain and Language (same as PSYC 309)