Topic Evolution in Positive Psychology and Schizophrenia Research: A BERTopic-Based Trend Analysis (2015 – 2025)

Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder (SSD) is a complex, chronic mental health condition. Earlier research in this field primarily focused on neurobiological mechanisms and pharmacological interventions. In contrast, recent studies have adopted recovery-oriented approaches and Positive Psychology (PP), emphasizing individual strengths, well-being, and psychological resources to enhance quality of life. This study analyzed 6,188 SSD-related publications from 2015 to 2025, sourced from the Web of Science Core Collection database. A semantic embedding-based BERTopic model, an advanced artificial intelligence tool for clustering topics by shared meaning, was employed to identify key research themes, track evolving trends, assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and investigate the transition toward bio-psychological integration, defined as the convergence of biological and psychological perspectives. The analysis revealed a decline in Positive Psychology–related research topics during the COVID-19 pandemic years (2020–2022), from 14.25% to 12.88%. Following this period, these topics increased to 13.60%, forming a distinct V-shaped trend (Wang et al., 2023). Semantic analysis also identified significant overlap between subjective well-being, defined as an individual's overall sense of happiness and life satisfaction, and biomedical topics, with a similarity score of 0.6780 (Kalyan & Sangeetha, 2021). These findings suggest that traditional pathological research is increasingly integrating psychological and social dimensions (Palliative care integration in psychiatric disorders: bibliometric analysis revealing five distinct research clusters, 2025). Additionally, the study demonstrated the utility of the BERTopic model in monitoring changes in SSD research themes and the progression of integrative approaches over time (Qu & Wang, 2025).