Differences in Emotional and Pain-Related Language in Tweets About Dentists and Medical Doctors: Text Analysis of Twitter Content
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Social media provides people with easy ways to communicate their attitudes and feelings to a wide audience. Many people, unfortunately, have negative associations and feelings about dental treatment due to former painful experiences. Previous research indicates that there might be a pervasive and negative occupational stereotype related to dentists and that this stereotype is expressed in many different venues, including movies and literature. OBJECTIVE: This study investigates the language used in relation to dentists and medical doctors on the social media platform Twitter. The purpose is to compare the professions in terms of the use of emotional and pain-related words, which might underlie and reflect the pervasive negative stereotype identified in relation to dentists. We hypothesized that (A) tweets about dentists will have more negative emotion-related words than those about medical doctors and (B) pain-related words occur more frequently in tweets about dentists than in those about medical doctors. METHODS: Twitter content ("tweets") about dentists and medical doctors was collected using the Twitter application program interface 140Dev over a 4-week period in 2015, scanning the search terms "dentist" and "doctor". Word content of the selected tweets was analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software. The research hypotheses were investigated using nonparametric Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests. RESULTS: Over 2.3 million tweets were collected in total, of which about one-third contained the word "dentist" and about two-thirds contained the word "doctor." Hypothesis A was supported since a higher proportion of negative words was used in tweets about dentists than in those about medical doctors (z=-10.47; P<.001). Similarly, tests showed a difference in the proportions of anger words (z=-12.54; P<.001), anxiety words (z=-6.96; P<.001), and sadness words (z=-9.58; P<.001), with higher proportions of these words in tweets about dentists than in those about doctors. Also, Hypothesis B was supported since a higher proportion of pain-related words was used in tweets about dentists than in those about doctors (z=-8.02; P<.001). CONCLUSIONS: The results from this study suggest that stereotypes regarding dentists and dental treatment are spread through social media such as Twitter and that social media also might represent an avenue for improving messaging and disseminating more positive attitudes toward dentists and dental treatment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".