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Sentiment Analysis of Children and Youth Literature: Is There a Pollyanna Effect?

If the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, as assumed by Boucher and Osgood’s (1969) famous Pollyanna hypothesis and computationally confirmed for large text corpora in several languages (Dodds et al., 2015), then children and youth literature (CYL) should also show...

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Autores principales: Jacobs, Arthur M., Herrmann, Berenike, Lauer, Gerhard, Lüdtke, Jana, Schroeder, Sascha
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7541694/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33071913
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.574746
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author Jacobs, Arthur M.
Herrmann, Berenike
Lauer, Gerhard
Lüdtke, Jana
Schroeder, Sascha
author_facet Jacobs, Arthur M.
Herrmann, Berenike
Lauer, Gerhard
Lüdtke, Jana
Schroeder, Sascha
author_sort Jacobs, Arthur M.
collection PubMed
description If the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, as assumed by Boucher and Osgood’s (1969) famous Pollyanna hypothesis and computationally confirmed for large text corpora in several languages (Dodds et al., 2015), then children and youth literature (CYL) should also show a Pollyanna effect. Here we tested this prediction applying an unsupervised vector space model-based sentiment analysis tool called SentiArt (Jacobs, 2019) to two CYL corpora, one in English (372 books) and one in German (500 books). Pitching our analysis at the sentence level, and assessing semantic as well as lexico-grammatical information, both corpora show the Pollyanna effect and thus add further evidence to the universality hypothesis. The results of our multivariate sentiment analyses provide interesting testable predictions for future scientific studies of literature.
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spelling pubmed-75416942020-10-17 Sentiment Analysis of Children and Youth Literature: Is There a Pollyanna Effect? Jacobs, Arthur M. Herrmann, Berenike Lauer, Gerhard Lüdtke, Jana Schroeder, Sascha Front Psychol Psychology If the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, as assumed by Boucher and Osgood’s (1969) famous Pollyanna hypothesis and computationally confirmed for large text corpora in several languages (Dodds et al., 2015), then children and youth literature (CYL) should also show a Pollyanna effect. Here we tested this prediction applying an unsupervised vector space model-based sentiment analysis tool called SentiArt (Jacobs, 2019) to two CYL corpora, one in English (372 books) and one in German (500 books). Pitching our analysis at the sentence level, and assessing semantic as well as lexico-grammatical information, both corpora show the Pollyanna effect and thus add further evidence to the universality hypothesis. The results of our multivariate sentiment analyses provide interesting testable predictions for future scientific studies of literature. Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-09-24 /pmc/articles/PMC7541694/ /pubmed/33071913 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.574746 Text en Copyright © 2020 Jacobs, Herrmann, Lauer, Lüdtke and Schroeder. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Jacobs, Arthur M.
Herrmann, Berenike
Lauer, Gerhard
Lüdtke, Jana
Schroeder, Sascha
Sentiment Analysis of Children and Youth Literature: Is There a Pollyanna Effect?
title Sentiment Analysis of Children and Youth Literature: Is There a Pollyanna Effect?
title_full Sentiment Analysis of Children and Youth Literature: Is There a Pollyanna Effect?
title_fullStr Sentiment Analysis of Children and Youth Literature: Is There a Pollyanna Effect?
title_full_unstemmed Sentiment Analysis of Children and Youth Literature: Is There a Pollyanna Effect?
title_short Sentiment Analysis of Children and Youth Literature: Is There a Pollyanna Effect?
title_sort sentiment analysis of children and youth literature: is there a pollyanna effect?
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7541694/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33071913
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.574746
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