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affect, concreteness, corpus linguistics, cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, stereotype accuracy, national character stereotypes, semantic prosody / Increasing use of natural language corpora and methods from corpus and computational linguistics as a supplement to traditional modes of scholarship in the social sciences and humanities has been labeled the "text as data movement." Corpora afford greater scope in terms of sample sizes, time, geography, and subject populations, as well as the opportunity to ecologically validate theories by testing their predictions within behaviour which is not elicited by an experimenter. Herein, five projects are presented, each either exploiting or taking inspiration from natural language data to make novel contributions to a subject matter area in the psychological sciences, including social psychology and psycholinguistics. Additionally, each project incorporates notions of word meaning grounded in psycholinguistic and psychoevolutionary theory, either the affective or sensorimotor connotations of words. This thesis ends with a discussion of the necessity of taking both experimental and observational approaches, as well as the challenge of how to link natural language data to psychological constructs. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The internet and modern computers are changing how scientists study the mind. Instead of doing experiments within a laboratory, it is more and more common for cognitive scientists to observe patterns in online language use. These patterns in language use are then used to comment on how the mind works. Online language use is created by diverse people as they go about their lives. This is valuable for scientists studying the mind. Our experiments are often limited by how many people and which people do experiments. Sometimes, experiments can be misleading because people don't act in the real world like they do in a lab. This thesis has five studies, each using online language use to comment on some part of how the mind works. Also, each study involves how words make people feel, or whether a word refers to something you can see or touch. Studying real people as they communicate offers new perspectives on old ideas or unanswered questions.