Sentiments

A list of personality, mood and tone markers, determined from IBM Watson’s Personality Insight analysis, which uses “Big Five” personality characteristics, plus “Needs” and “Values.”

From IBM Watson’s Documentation:

• Big Five personality characteristics represent the most widely used model for generally describing how a person engages with the world. The model includes five primary characteristics, or dimensions:
  • Agreeableness is a person’s tendency to be compassionate and cooperative toward others.
  • Conscientiousness is a person’s tendency to act in an organized or thoughtful way.
  • Extraversion is a person’s tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others.
  • Emotional Range, also referred to as Neuroticism or Natural Reactions, is the extent to which a person’s emotions are sensitive to the person’s environment.
  • Openness is the extent to which a person is open to experiencing a variety of activities.
• Each of these top-level dimensions has six facets that further characterize an individual according to the dimension.
• Needs describe which aspects of a product will resonate with a person. The model includes twelve characteristic needs: Excitement, Harmony, Curiosity, Ideal, Closeness, Self-expression, Liberty, Love, Practicality, Stability, Challenge, and Structure.
• Values describe motivating factors that influence a person’s decision making. The model includes five dimensions of human values: Self-transcendence / Helping others, Conservation / Tradition, Hedonism / Taking pleasure in life, Self-enhancement / Achieving success, and Open to change / Excitement.

Sentiments in a document are ranked on their absence or presence on a scale of -1 to 1, with 0 representing the average sentiment in the IBM Watson Personality Insights baseline. We can use this scale to highlight areas within our sources, and surrounding different terms that differ significantly from the baseline, and observe how and where those sentiments relate to the historical contexts of this research.