Development of computational models for emotional diary text analysis to support maternal care

TL;DR

This paper introduces new computational models for analyzing emotional diary texts of pregnant women, aiming to enhance communication and support maternal care through affective ratings and linguistic data analysis.

Contribution

The study develops novel models based on affective ratings and vector space methods to interpret emotional expressions in maternal care contexts, considering population subgroup differences.

Findings

Affective ratings correlated with pleasure and dominance dimensions.

Models showed significant differences based on gender, parental role, and time of day.

Results align with known affectivity differences related to gender, age, and motherhood.

Abstract

We propose new computational models for analyzing self-reported emotional diary texts of pregnant women to support maternal care. We gathered affective ratings outside clinical setting and developed new models to facilitate interpretation and communication of affective expressions between persons representing different affective ratings. Relying on constructed emotion theory, models of dimensional emotion categories and affective ratings of Self Assessment Manikin, we demonstrate our new proposal to analyze linguistic data with computational models exploiting vector space and clustering methods. 35 persons having Finnish as a native language provided affective ratings for 195 emotional adjectives and 16 pregnancy-related nouns in Finnish in dimensions of pleasure, arousal and dominance. We developed new models to represent dependencies and differences of affective ratings between various population subgroup categorizations, including "women without children", "women with children" and "men without children" that we consider important population segments to be addressed in maternal care. Our affective ratings showed significant correlations between pleasure and dominance (like Warriner et al., 2013) and with previous data collections (S\"oderholm et al., 2013; Eilola & Havelka, 2010; Warriner et al., 2013). Our affective ratings had significant effects on categorizations based on gender, gender-parental role and the time of the day and duration of giving ratings. Our results indicate accordance with significant affectivity differences of gender and age (Warriner et al., 2013) and motherhood (Rosebrock et al., 2015). Our proposed models aim to support health-related communication. Our results suggest gathering next the affective ratings of patients of maternal care in a real clinical setting.