Time-synchronic comments on video streaming website reveal core structures of audience engagement in movie viewing

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Wenjing Ni¹  Christophe Coupé¹ 

[1] Department of Linguistics, School of Humanities, The University of Hong Kong;Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, UMR 5596-CNRS, Université Lyon 2

关键词: Social Media;    Psychology;    Natural Language Processing;    Human Media Interaction;    media psychology;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1040755

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

To what extent movie viewers are swept into a fictional world has long been pondered by psychologists and filmmakers. With the development of time-synchronic comments on online viewing platforms, we can now analyze viewers’ immediate responses towards movies. We collected over 3 million Chinese time-synchronic comments and applied natural language processing (NLP) techniques to investigate linguistic patterns under different movie genres. We first highlight different commenting behaviors in front of various movies and how comments are organized in a range of topics. Through the assessment of emotion and cognition-related word rates in comments, we further identify how topics are discussed through time, as well as prototypical diachronic trajectories of psychological engagement of the audience. We then try to account for viewer’s engagement, considering successively movie genres, topics and movie content. Among other points, we finally discuss the challenge in explaining the trajectories of engagement and the disconnection with narrative content. Overall, our study provides a new perspective on using social media data to answer questions from psychology and film studies. It underscores the potential of time-synchronic comments as a resource for detecting real-time human responses to specific events.

【 授权许可】

CC BY