When danger strikes: A linguistic tool for tracking America's collective response to threats.

ABSTRACT: In today's vast digital landscape, people are constantly exposed to threatening language, which attracts attention and activates the human brain's fear circuitry. However, to date, we have lacked the tools needed to identify threatening language and track its impact on human groups. To fill this gap, we developed a threat dictionary, a computationally derived linguistic tool that indexes threat levels from mass communication channels. We demonstrate this measure's convergent validity with objective threats in American history, including violent conflicts, natural disasters, and pathogen outbreaks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the dictionary offers predictive insights on US society's shifting cultural norms, political attitudes, and macroeconomic activities. Using data from newsp

SUBMITTER: Choi VK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8795557 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature