Éva Fülöp

Narrative Language as an Expression of Individual and Group Identity: The Narrative Categorical Content Analysis

Scientific Narrative Psychology integrates quantitative methodologies into the study of identity. Its methodology, Narrative Categorical Analysis, and its toolkit, NarrCat, were both originally developed by the Hungarian Narrative Psychology Group. NarrCat is for machine-made transformation of sentences in self-narratives into psychologically relevant, statistically processable narrative categories. The main body of this flexible and comprehensive system is formed by Psycho-Thematic modules, such as Agency, Evaluation, Emotion, Cognition, Spatiality, and Temporality. The Relational Modules include Social References, Semantic Role Labeling (SRL), and Negation. Certain elements can be combined into Hypermodules, such as Psychological Perspective and Spatio-Temporal Perspective, which allow for even more complex, higher level exploration of composite psychological processes. Using up-to-date developments of corpus linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP), a unique feature of NarrCat is its capacity of SRL. The structure of NarrCat, as well as the empirical results in group identity research, is discussed.

Beyond Sentiment: Social Psychological Analysis of Political Facebook Comments in Hungary

This paper presents the methodology and results of a project for the large-scale analysis of public messages in political discourse on Facebook, the dominant social media site in Hungary. We propose several novel social psychology- motivated dimensions for natural language processing-based text analysis that go beyond the standard sentiment-based analysis approaches. Communion describes the moral and emotional aspects of an individual’s relations to others, while agency describes individuals in terms of the efficiency of their goal- orientated behavior. We treat these by custom lexicons that identify positive and negative cues in text. We measure the level of optimism in messages by examining the ratio of events talked about in the past, present and future by looking at verb tenses and temporal expressions. For assessing the level of individualism, we build on research that correlates it to pronoun dropping. We also present re- sults that demonstrate the viability of our measures on 1.9 million downloaded public Facebook comments by examining correlation to party preferences in public opinion poll data.