Learning Word Ratings for Empathy and Distress from Document-Level User Responses
Table 2: Illustrative examples from final lexicon: highest/lowest ranking words for empathy and distress.
['[BOLD] High Empathy', 'lukemia', '[BOLD] Empathy 6.90', '[BOLD] Distress 5.09']
Our final lexicon consists of 9,356 word types (lower-cased, non-lemmatized, including named entities and spelling errors) each with associated empathy and distress ratings. High-empathy words contain many named entities that experience or cause suffering making a reader feel empathic (e.g., lukemia or lakota). This is likely because the Empathic Reactions corpus used news stories to evoke empathy in subjects who then referred to those named entities for expressing their feeling Low-empathy words, on the other hand, are often ones used for ridiculing, hence expressing a lack of empathy (joke, wacky). High-Distress words contain predominantly adjectives, nouns, and participles which can be used to characterize abusive behaviour (inhumane, mistreating) thus causing personal distress in readers when taking the perspective of the affected entity. Interestingly, low-distress words do not seem to display any clear pattern, making us suspect that personal distress should be addressed in terms of a unipolar rather than a bipolar scale.