Complex Language, Negative Emotion, and Entertainment: Psychological Linguistic Elements of Mobile Comments on News Stories

Despite scholarly attention to comments on news, no studies investigate psychological linguistic elements of mobile comments to reveal their complex structure. To fill this gap, we analyze the psychological linguistic elements of mobile comments on news content produced by South Korean major news organizations. By using the K-LIWC, a psychological linguistic analysis program, we could find that the number of sentences, first-person pronouns, and 26 other elements vary with the comments on broadcast and newspaper content. Specifically, mobile comments on a conservative newspaper, a liberal newspaper, SBS and KBS were salient in language complexities (e.g., morphemes and phrases). The two newspapers’ comments carry negative emotional words, whereas the mobile comments on SBS, a commercial network, highlight entertainment. This study provided a protocol and base information on how the language analysis program can be used in a mass communication study.