Words describing feelings about death: A comparison of sentiment for self and others and changes over time

Abstract

Understanding public attitudes towards death is needed to inform health policies to foster community death awareness and preparedness. Linguistic sentiment analysis of how people describe their feelings about death can add to knowledge gained from traditional self-reports. This study provided the first description of emotive attitudes expressed towards death utilising textual sentiment analysis for the dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance. A linguistic lexicon of sentiment norms was applied to activities conducted in an online course for the general-public designed to generate discussion about death. We analysed the sentiment of words people chose to describe feelings about death, for themselves, for perceptions of the feelings of ‘others’, and for longitudinal changes over the time-period of exposure to a course about death (n = 1491). The results demonstrated that sadness pervades affective responses to death, and that inevitability, peace, and fear were also frequent reactions. However, words chosen to represent perceptions of others’ feelings towards death suggested that participants perceived others as feeling more negative about death than they do themselves. Analysis of valence, arousal and dominance dimensions of sentiment pre-to-post course participation demonstrated that participants chose significantly happier (more positive) valence words, less arousing (calmer) words, and more dominant (in-control) words to express their feelings about death by the course end. This suggests that the course may have been helpful in participants becoming more emotionally accepting in their feelings and attitude towards death. Furthermore, the change over time appeared greater for younger participants, who showed more increase in the dominance (power/control) and pleasantness (valence) in words chosen at course completion. Sentiment analysis of words to describe death usefully extended our understanding of community death attitudes and emotions. Future application of sentiment analysis to other related areas of health policy interest such as attitudes towards Advance Care Planning and palliative care may prove fruitful.

Avicii’s S.O.S.: A psychobiographical approach and corpus-based discourse analysis on suicidal ideation

“…), researchers can explore one's life story and examine any suicidal patterns, discover any risk factors in their environment, and establish the contributions of their discourse to understanding the fragility of life -why people die by suicide. In the field of cognitive science and psycholinguistics, text analysis is applied to detect suicidal predictors through suicide notes (Egnoto & Griffin, 2016), social media posts (Chadha & Kaushik, 2019), written reflections (Miller-Lewis et al, 2021), and song lyrics (Markowitz & Hancock, 2017). Critical discourse analysis is also used to understand the discursive nature of talking about suicide (Marsh, 2010) and how (in)direct language can shape (mis)representations of negative emotions, suicide, and suicidal behaviors (Fitzpatrick, 2014).…”

Вплив Смерті Хворих На Формування Механізмів Психологічного Захисту В Лікарів

“…Використання домінуючих механізмів психологічного захисту в чоловіків-лікарів У науковій літературі ми натрапляємо на повідомлення про вплив різних стресових ситуацій чи особливостей професії на поведінку людини, що спонукає її до використання певних механізмів психологічного захисту [20]. Крім того, в окремих публікаціях відмічено, що в медичних працівників часто виникають сильні емоційні реакції, пов'язані зі смертю хворого [19]. Захищаючись від таких травматичних почуттів, лікарі найчастіше використовують зрілі механізми психологічного захисту -заміщення та раціоналізацію, що також знайшло своє підтвердження і в нашому дослідженні.…”

Examining the Emotional Semantic Orientation of Gifted Students Towards the Flipped Learning Model

“…(Krauss & Chiu, 1998 ). Thus, one way of examining individuals' attitudes towards an event or situation is to analyze the types of words they prefer and the linguistic emotion inherent in these words (Miller-Lewis et al, 2021 ). Moreover, experimental interventions can reveal a significant effect on the values of individuals' words.…”