Developing and validating the self-transcendent emotion dictionary for text analysis

PLoS One. 2020 Sep 11;15(9):e0239050. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0239050. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing amount of research effort directed toward what positive media psychologists refer to as self-transcendent emotions, such as awe, admiration, elevation, gratitude, inspiration, and hope. While these emotions are invaluable to promote greater human connectedness, prosociality, and human flourishing, researchers are constrained in terms of analyzing self-transcendent emotions as expressed in spoken and written languages. Drawing upon the word-counting approach of the text analysis paradigm, this project aimed at constructing a dictionary tool-Self-Transcendent Emotion Dictionary (STED)-which can be uploaded into mainstream, text analytic software (e.g., LIWC) to identify and analyze self-transcendent emotions in large corpora. This dictionary tool was then refined and validated via three studies, where individual words were first rated with regard to their fitness into the proposed construct (Step 1), and then used to analyze essays written to reflect the corresponding construct (Step 2). Finally, the refined dictionary was applied to examine words used in nearly 4,000 human-coded New York Times articles (Step 3). Results indicated that the final dictionary, consisting of 351 lexicons and phrases, exhibits acceptable face and construct validity, and possesses a reasonable level of external validity and applicability. Despite its shortcoming in accounting for the rhetorical techniques ingrained in natural human language, the STED could be instrumental for social scientific inquiry of positive emotions in textual narratives.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Validation Study

MeSH terms

  • Data Mining
  • Dictionaries as Topic*
  • Emotions*
  • Hope
  • Humans
  • Language*
  • Narration
  • Newspapers as Topic
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Semantics
  • Software
  • Writing

Associated data

  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.11659233.v3

Grants and funding

This project was made possible through the support of a grant awarded to AR from the John Templeton Foundation https://www.templeton.org/ (55826). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.