“Too many Americans are trapped in fear, violence and poverty”: A psychology-informed sentiment analysis of campaign speeches from the 2016 US presidential election

Abstract

Most automatic sentiment analyses of texts tend to only employ a simple positive-negative polarity to classify emotions. In this paper, I illustrate a more fine-grained automatic sentiment analysis [Jockers, Matthew. 2016. Introduction to the Syuzhet package. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/syuzhet/vignettes/syuzhetvignette.html (accessed 07 March 2017).; Mohammad, Saif M. & Peter D. Turney. 2013. Crowd sourcing a word-emotion association lexicon. Computational Intelligence 29(3). 436–465.] that is based on a classification of human emotions that has been put forward by psychological research [Plutchik, Robert. 1994. The psychology and biology of emotion. New York, NY: HarperCollins College Publishers.]. The advantages of this approach are illustrated by a sample study that analyses the emotional sentiment of the campaign speeches of the two main candidates of the 2016 US presidential election.