Rate My Professor Ryan Boyd

Ryan L. Boyd is an Assistant Professor of Psychology in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas, a position he has held since 2024. He also serves as Affiliated Faculty with the Texas Artificial Intelligence Research Institute since 2025. Boyd earned his Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017, M.Sc. in Social and Health Psychology from North Dakota State University in 2012, and B.A. in Psychology from Indiana University–Purdue University Ft. Wayne in 2010. Prior appointments include Associate Research Professor and Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University (2023–2024), Computational Social Scientist in the Behavioral Science Lab and Threat Research Lab at ByteDance/TikTok (2022–2023), Assistant Professor of Behavioral Analytics in the Department of Psychology at Lancaster University (2019–2022), Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin (2017–2019), and visiting scholar at Microsoft Research and Stony Brook University (2018).

Boyd studies how everyday language reflects and shapes human psychology—from personality and emotion to social connection and mental health—in laboratory and real-world settings using computational social science and natural language processing. A leading contributor to the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) project, he co-authored The development and psychometric properties of LIWC-22 (2022) and The development and psychometric properties of LIWC2015 (2015). Other major publications include The narrative arc: Revealing core narrative structures through text analysis (Science Advances, 2020), Natural language analysis and the psychology of verbal behavior: The past, present, and future states of the field (Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 2021), and he co-edited The Handbook of Language Analysis in Psychology (2023). With more than 100 scholarly papers and over 14,000 citations, his research influences policy, cited by the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. Boyd received the Recognized Scholar Award from the Association for Psychological Science (2016), serves as Associate Editor for Social Psychology, and holds editorial roles on multiple boards. He has obtained grants including the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board MHGP award ($400,000, 2025–2027).