Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Immigrants always have difficulties in integrating into a local society, and sometimes these difficulties come fromthe fact that they are subconsciously regarded as someone from the outside. How they are represented in the main stream mediacould reflect people’s perceptions towards the ‘otherness’ of different social members. We analyzed the representation of 29US immigrant groups in newspaper articles in 2 related studies. The favorability of an immigrant groups is highly associatedwith its perceived social distance (reflected through usage of concrete language) in our research. To further understand whatcaused the positive or negative image of immigrants, we applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation to identify topics associated withimmigrant groups. We also investigated into how these news topics differ in terms of lingual social distance and favorability.The results provide both qualitative and quantitative insights in how the image of immigrants are reproduced in social media.