Beyond Sentiment: Social Psychological Analysis of Political Facebook Comments in Hungary

Abstract

This paper presents the methodology and results of a project for the large-scale analysis of public messages in political discourse on Facebook, the dominant social media site in Hungary. We propose several novel social psychologymotivated dimensions for natural language processing-based text analysis that go beyond the standard sentiment-based analysis approaches. Communion describes the moral and emotional aspects of an individual's relations to others, while agency describes individuals in terms of the efficiency of their goalorientated behavior. We treat these by custom lexicons that identify positive and negative cues in text. We measure the level of optimism in messages by examining the ratio of events talked about in the past, present and future by looking at verb tenses and temporal expressions. For assessing the level of individualism, we build on research that correlates it to pronoun dropping. We also present results that demonstrate the viability of our measures on 1.9 million downloaded public Facebook comments by examining correlation to party preferences in public opinion poll data.

Discovered and Undiscovered Fields of Digital Politics : Mapping Online Political Communication and Online News Media Literature in Hungary

“…Public comments written in response to political posts on Facebook were investigated using novel socio-psychological measures. Data suggest that comments associated with sentiments of communitarian thinking were more frequent during the campaign period for the general election of 2014 (Miháltz et al 2015).…”

Sentiment Analysis from Facebook Comments using Automatic Coding in NVivo 11

“…The sentiments of Facebook users with respect to 187 politicians after the 2013 German federal elections were analysed in order to assess public opinions (Caton et al, 2015). Mihaltz et al (2015) analysed 1.9 million political Facebook comments to determine past, present and future optimism. In a study on MySpace, it was found that female users tend to receive and give more positive comments than male users although there is no significant difference for negative comments (Thelwall et al, 2010).…”