Quantifying changes in societal optimism from online sentiment.
Behav Res Methods
; 55(1): 176-184, 2023 01.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-35318589
ABSTRACT
Individuals can hold contrasting views about distinct times for example, dread over tomorrow's appointment and excitement about next summer's vacation. Yet, psychological measures of optimism often assess only one time point or ask participants to generalize about their future. Here, we address these limitations by developing the optimism curve, a measure of societal optimism that compares positivity toward different future times that was inspired by the Treasury bond yield curve. By performing sentiment analysis on over 3.5 million tweets that reference 23 future time points (2 days to 30 years), we measured how positivity differs across short-, medium-, and longer-term future references. We found a consistent negative association between positivity and the distance into the future referenced From August 2017 to February 2020, the long-term future was discussed less positively than the short-term future. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this relationship inverted, indicating declining near-future- but stable distant-future-optimism. Our results demonstrate that individuals hold differentiated attitudes toward the near and distant future that shift in aggregate over time in response to external events. The optimism curve uniquely captures these shifting attitudes and may serve as a useful tool that can expand existing psychometric measures of optimism.
Palabras clave
Texto completo:
1
Bases de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Medios de Comunicación Sociales
/
COVID-19
Límite:
Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Behav Res Methods
Asunto de la revista:
CIENCIAS DO COMPORTAMENTO
Año:
2023
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Estados Unidos