Want To Know Whether A Movie Or Book Will Be A Hit? Look At How Emotional The Reviews Are

By Emma Young You want to choose a new vacuum cleaner, or book, or hotel, or kids’ toy, or movie to watch — so what do you do? No doubt, you go online and check the star ratings for various options on sites such as Amazon or TripAdvisor, and so benefit from the wisdom of crowds. However, there are problems with this star-based system, as a new paper in Nature Human Behaviour makes clear. Firstly, most ratings are positive — so how do you choose between two, or potentially many more, products with high ratings, or even the same top rating? Secondly, star ratings aren’t a great predictor of the success (and so actual general appeal and approval) of a movie, book, and so on, note Matthew D. Rocklage at the University of Massachusetts and his colleagues. The team presents an alternative method for picking the best product and also predicting success, which focuses on the emotional responses of the reviewers. In all four studies reported in the paper, the team used a text analysis tool called the Evaluative Lexicon. This provided measures of the average emotionality and valence (positivity) of a review. Emotionality relates to how much an attitude is rooted in emotion, rather than how positive or negative it is (so reviews that included lots of terms like “awe-inspiring” or “enchanting” got higher emotionality scores than reviews with terms like “impeccable”.) First, the team looked at the earliest 30 reviews for all movies ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Media Source Type: blogs