Quantifying changes in societal optimism from online sentiment.

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 refer

SUBMITTER: Isch C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8939395 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature