Emotional profiling and cognitive networks unravel how mainstream and alternative press framed AstraZeneca, Pfizer and COVID-19 vaccination campaigns

Abstract

COVID-19 vaccines have been largely debated by the press. To understand how mainstream and alternative media debated vaccines, we introduce a paradigm reconstructing time-evolving narrative frames via cognitive networks and natural language processing. We study Italian news articles massively re-shared on Facebook/Twitter (up to 5 million times), covering 5745 vaccine-related news from 17 news outlets over 8 months. We find consistently high trust/anticipation and low disgust in the way mainstream sources framed “vaccine/vaccino”. These emotions were crucially missing in alternative outlets. News titles from alternative sources framed “AstraZeneca” with sadness, absent in mainstream titles. Initially, mainstream news linked mostly “Pfizer” with side effects (e.g. “allergy”, “reaction”, “fever”). With the temporary suspension of “AstraZeneca”, negative associations shifted: Mainstream titles prominently linked “AstraZeneca” with side effects, while “Pfizer” underwent a positive valence shift, linked to its higher efficacy. Simultaneously, thrombosis and fearful conceptual associations entered the frame of vaccines, while death changed context, i.e. rather than hopefully preventing deaths, vaccines could be reported as potential causes of death, increasing fear. Our findings expose crucial aspects of the emotional narratives around COVID-19 vaccines adopted by the press, highlighting the need to understand how alternative and mainstream media report vaccination news.

Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Networks Identify UK Insurers’ Trends in Investor Day Transcripts

“…In this sense, such techniques could be considered as complementary to more common quantitative analyses based on numerical data. In particular, cognitive networks and their ability to showcase the associative structure of knowledge from texts [5,11,37,39] could prove powerful in understanding points of view from different firms/reports. The statistical analysis indicated a relatively small correlation between sentiment scores and share price movement -suggesting limited insight at a company level.…”

“…Cognitive networks are models that can map how concepts are organised and associated in cognitive data like texts, e.g. social media posts [5,14,19], movie transcripts [37] and books [25,38,39]. The structure of cognitive networks was shown to highlight key cognitive patterns like writing styles [39], alterations to cognition due to psychedelic drugs [36], and, relevantly for this work, it could reconstruct the semantic and emotional content of online perceptions towards to gender gap in science [15] and COVID-19 vaccines [5,40].…”

“…social media posts [5,14,19], movie transcripts [37] and books [25,38,39]. The structure of cognitive networks was shown to highlight key cognitive patterns like writing styles [39], alterations to cognition due to psychedelic drugs [36], and, relevantly for this work, it could reconstruct the semantic and emotional content of online perceptions towards to gender gap in science [15] and COVID-19 vaccines [5,40]. In text analysis, cognitive networks are advantageous for reconstructing the semantic frame of a target concept, i.e.…”

“…the set of words appearing in the same context of the target and specifying its meaning [13,14]. In a network representing syntactic relationships between words, this semantic frame can be mapped onto the set of words adjacent to a given target one [5,15]. We follow a similar approach, reconstructing a network of word associations in insurance reports (both from analysts and insurers) and investigating target words by analysing their semantic frames/network neighborhoods.…”

“…Both the analyses reported in Figure 3 could complement PRA internal planning meetings in providing an independent perspective of what topics the market is discussing -and hence whether they should be represented to a similar degree by the regulator. Words are clustered in Louvain communities only for the sake of visualisation (see also [5]).…”