University of Twente Student Theses
Investigating the Use of the Term ‘Narcissist’ on Twitter : A Text Mining Approach
Vorhauer, Josie (2024) Investigating the Use of the Term ‘Narcissist’ on Twitter : A Text Mining Approach.
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| Abstract: | Objective: Mental health care professionals have been increasingly discussing the misuse of the term ‘narcissist’ on social media, warning of a stigmatization of people with a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). However, no empirical study has yet systematically explored the use of the term ‘narcissist’ on social media. Using a text mining approach, the aim of the current study was to investigate the use of and sentiment towards the term ‘narcissist’ on Twitter. Method: The data consisted of all tweets that included the keyword ‘narcissist’ posted between the 19th and 26th of March 2023. The tweets were scraped and imported into the data mining toolkit Orange, where the tweets were pre-processed and analysed using LDA topic modelling and a VADER-based sentiment analysis. The final corpus consisted of 30,205 tweets. Results: The word frequency analysis showed that trump was the most frequently used word in the corpus followed by people, lie, “cross mark” emoji, man, malignant, love, liar, life and woman. Topic modelling revealed that the most prevalent topic was Narcissistic Abuse & Relationships, with 28.56% of all tweets discussing this topic, followed by Politics (24.49%), Donald Trump & U.S. Elections (20.73%) and Antisocial & Pathological Traits (13.15%). Twitter users expressed on average a negative sentiment when they used the term ‘narcissist’, with nearly half of the tweets (47.53%) expressing a negative sentiment. The sentiments expressed across all topics were also on average negative. There was a statistically significant difference in mean compound sentiment scores between topics [F(4, 30200) = 97.47, p < .001]. Twitter users expressed the most negative sentiment in Tweets about Donald Trump & U.S. Elections. Conclusion: The results of the current paper suggest that Twitter users frequently used the term ‘narcissist’ in personal contexts (e.g., abuse within relationships), and in political discussions (e.g., Donald Trump and elections). Furthermore, the overall negative sentiment of the tweets implies that the term ‘narcissist’ was mostly used in negatively connotated contexts. This colloquial and negative use of the term ‘narcissist’ may contribute to the stigmatization of NPD. Future research may investigate if negatively connotated tweets about narcissists (e.g., tweets about so-called narcissistic abuse) may lead to an increase in negative attitudes or change in intended behaviour towards people with NPD and whether clinical information about NPD can mitigate these effects. |
| 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/103688 |
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