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Does the Reddit user audience report feelings of empathy after watching the movie “Avatar: The Way of Water “?

Warda, Luise (2024) Does the Reddit user audience report feelings of empathy after watching the movie “Avatar: The Way of Water “?

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Abstract:As environmental protection becomes increasingly urgent, films like "Avatar: The Way of Water" can influence viewers' attitudes through narrative persuasion. This study uses a qualitative text mining approach, combining topic modelling and computer-assisted text analysis, to explore empathy-related discussions within the Avatar-2 fan community on Reddit. By analyzing 733 posts and comments using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), ten key topics were identified and examined through four components of empathy: Perspective-taking, Empathic concern, Personal Distress, and Fantasy. The findings show that perspective-taking was most prevalent, followed by empathic concern, especially in discussions about strong character relationships. Personal distress was less common. These results suggest that character relationships and narrative development enhance empathy for non-human characters in environmental films. The study's strength lies in using real-world textual responses from Reddit, offering a detailed exploration of empathy in discussions among Avatar-2 fans. However, limitations include potential bias due to the fan-centric nature of Reddit and challenges in topic selection using LDA modelling. Future research should expand to diverse social media platforms, improve keyword sets, and consider advanced NLP methods to enhance data completeness and generalizability.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:77 psychology
Programme:Psychology MSc (66604)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/103297
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