Positive Tones Research Articles

Stock pledge and media slant: evidence from China

ABSTRACT This paper explores the relationship between stock pledges and media slants. Using data from China, we find that firms with controlling shareholders that start to pledge shares or increase shares pledging for loans are covered with more positive media tones. The association is more prominent when firms with higher margin call pressure, closer relationships with media, more individual investor holdings, and less analyst coverage. We further investigate the underlying channels through which stock pledges may affect media slant. Our results show that stock-pledging firms promote media slants by releasing positive news in pre-announcements and increasing advertising expenditure. We also find that the optimistic media slant of pledging firms results from increased favorable media reports instead of reducing negative information. Moreover, positive media slants will lead to a higher excess stock return of pledging firms. Compared with negative news, positive media coverage is more likely to affect pledging firms’ stock returns. Our findings prove that share-pledging firms may engage in media management. We also provide evidence for the existence of media bias in emerging markets.

The impact of environmental disclosure on initial public offering underpricing: Sustainable development in Singapore

AbstractThis study applies signaling theory to examine the impact of environmental disclosures on equity underpricing at initial public offerings (IPO) when private firms list on stock exchanges. Firms often under‐price their shares to attract investors as IPOs have high information asymmetry between firms and investors. Using a linguistic technique on environmental disclosures in prospectuses from 2009 to 2019 in the Singapore Exchange, we find that disclosures with a positive tone correlate with lower underpricing, but only if these disclosures are authentic. This finding is robust to different model specifications and measurements. We provide new evidence that linguistic features, that is, tone and authenticity, interact to influence a key IPO outcome. The results suggest that investors are not easily attracted by positive disclosure tones but are also concerned with the authenticity of such disclosures. This finding informs firms and various stakeholders navigating the nascent and growing wave of sustainability reporting in Singapore.

Framing of Abrogation of Article 370 in the US and UK Press: A Content Analysis of the New York Times and the Guardian

This Research Paper is an attempt to investigate how leading newspapers in the US and UK framed the issues of Kashmir after the revocation of Article 370. Using the content analysis method this study also aims to understand the frames used in the news stories and Editorials published by these newspapers, from August 5th, 2019 to August 5th, 2020. A total of 113 news stories with numerous frames have been published in both “The New York Times and The Guardian”. The former newspaper published 54 news stories with 13 on the front page and 41 on the international page. While "The Guardian" published 59 news stories with 11 on the front and 48 on the international page. Similarly, a total of 17 Editorials were published during a one-year period whereas "The New York Times" published 8 with both positive and negative tones.

The effect of masker type on the sensitivity of the digits in noise test for detecting hearing loss

The Digits-in-Noise (DIN) test, a quick hearing-loss screening tool with high test-retest reliability and good sensitivity and specificity, can substitute for an audiogram when calibrated audiometry is unavailable. Traditionally, listeners hear three digits in speech-shaped noise, but other masker types might more effectively distinguish normal hearing thresholds (NHTs) from elevated hearing thresholds (EHTs). This study compared the ability of different energetic and informational maskers to detect low-frequency pure-tone averages >20 dB HL. First, DIN perception was adaptively measured (N = 1149 subjects) to determine the 80% correct speech-reception threshold (SRT80) for each of six masker types: female, male, and multi-gender multitalker babble; positive and negative Schroeder-phase complex tones; and speech-shaped noise. Then, for each masker type, a different group of subjects was tested at the corresponding SRT80. As expected, preliminary results suggest that a positive Schroeder-phase masker produces the greatest differences in DIN scores between NHTs and EHTs. Sensitivity and specificity rates for EHT detection for each masker, along with intersubject variability and order effects, will be explored. [The views expressed in this abstract are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy of the Department of Army/Navy/Air Force, Department of Defense, or U.S. Government.]

Automatic sentiment analysis of public opinion on nuclear energy

Abstract Opinion mining and sentiment analysis based on social media has been developed these years, especially with the popularity of social media and the development of machine learning. But in the community of nuclear engineering and technology, sentiment analysis is seldom studied, let alone the automatic analysis by using machine learning algorithms. This work concentrates on the public sentiment mining of nuclear energy in German-speaking countries based on the public comments of nuclear news in social media by using the automatic methodology, since compared with the news itself, the comments are closer to the public real opinions. The results showed that majority comments kept in neutral sentiment. 23% of comments were in positive tones, which were approximate 4 times those in negative tones. The concerning issues of the public are the innovative technology development, safety, nuclear waste, accidents and the cost of nuclear power. Decision tree, random forest and long short-term memory networks (LSTM) are adopted for the automatic sentiment analysis. The results show that all of the proposed methods can be applied in practice to some extent. But as a deep learning algorithm, LSTM gets the highest accuracy approximately 85.6% with also the best robustness of all.

COVID-19 dialogue on Facebook: Crisis Communication relationship between Ghanaian Authorities and Citizens

The paper explored how the Ministry of Information (M.O.I.), the official mouthpiece of the government of Ghana, interacted with citizens during the COVID-19 outbreak within the context of crisis communication as a tool for authority-citizen engagement on Facebook. Content analysis of COVID-19 comments on the Ministry of Information’s official Facebook page showed higher participation in the discussion from citizens. However, authorities only provided information by being inactive participants in the interaction. The dominant issues focused on Ghanaian authorities and their actions, the course of events surrounding the pandemic, infected cases and deaths, and Ghana’s recovery efforts. The active publics provided information, asked and answered questions, and expressed their opinions as the discussions were ongoing. The comments portrayed negative, positive, and neutral tones. The paper also revealed diverse challenges that are likely to hinder crisis communication during the pandemic, from the inflexibility of action, quality of information, and disparity of knowledge.

PREDICTION OF POST AND REPOST CONTENT ON CILETUH GEOPARK INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTS IN THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

During this pandemic, the ease of use of the Instagram application has made it a medium of information to meet user needs, including for tourism purposes. Indonesia has many tourist destinations with the concept of sustainable tourism, one of which is the Ciletuh Geopark. Geopark Ciletuh has an Instagram account that actively posts various content. Geopark Ciletuh's Instagram account, namely @geopark_ciletuh_sukabumi uses posts and reposts as content sources. Its function is to increase the visibility of tourist destinations. This study uses a qualitative descriptive method to study the predisposition of the content of @geopark_ciletuh_sukabumi to build engagement with the audience. The purpose of this study includes a description of the difference in a post and repost content, the tone of followers' comments, and the process of diffusion of tourism ideas to the Ciletuh Geopark. The conclusion from the results of this study is that the post content on the @geopark_ciletuh_sukabumi Instagram account does not reach 100 likes in each post. Reposting content on the @geopark_ciletuh_sukabumi Instagram account has more engagement in terms of the number of likes and comments. Meanwhile, the content tone in the comment column is divided into positive tones, neutral tones, and negative tones. The process of diffusion of ideas also depends on the length of time it takes for each individual or group to adopt the idea of ​​traveling to the Ciletuh Geopark which is spread on Instagram accounts.

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

Progress and push-back: How the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd impacted public discourse on race and racism on Twitter

This study examined whether killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor by current or former law enforcement officers in 2020 were followed by shifts in public sentiment toward Black people. Methods: Google searches for the names “Ahmaud Arbery,” “Breonna Taylor,” and “George Floyd” were obtained from the Google Health Application Programming Interface (API). Using the Twitter API, we collected a 1% random sample of publicly available U.S. race-related tweets from November 2019–September 2020 (N = 3,380,616). Sentiment analysis was performed using Support Vector Machines, a supervised machine learning model. A qualitative content analysis was conducted on a random sample of 3,000 tweets to understand themes in discussions of race and racism and inform interpretation of the quantitative trends. Results: The highest rate of Google searches for any of the three names was for George Floyd during the week of May 31 to June 6, the week after his murder. The percent of tweets referencing Black people that were negative decreased by 32% (from 49.33% in November 4–9 to 33.66% in June 1–7) (p < 0.001), but this decline was temporary, lasting just a few weeks. Themes that emerged during the content analysis included discussion of race or racism in positive (14%) or negative (38%) tones, call for action related to racism (18%), and counter movement/arguments against racism-related changes (6%). Conclusion: Although there was a sharp decline in negative Black sentiment and increased public awareness of structural racism and desire for long-lasting social change, these shifts were transitory and returned to baseline after several weeks. Findings suggest that negative attitudes towards Black people remain deeply entrenched.

The Trump Era: The Talk-Show that Shook the World

This article aims to review a fundamental study by Russian authors of the causes, course and consequences of the 45th US President's stay in the White House. His cadence turned out to be unique in modern American history: two impeachment procedures, several massive explosions of interethnic riots, and finally the storming of the Capitol. This is him – a businessman with dubious success, a showman, and ultimately – the first person of America. The president is called "on intuition", "non-systemic" – without experience in government structures. However, he was quite successful in deepening the political and ideological divide in his country. And today, almost a year later, those Americans who voted for D. Trump on November 3, 2020 continue to speak of him in positive tones, and the rest – a little more than half of the total number of those who cast their votes – do it in sharply negative manner. The period of the 45th president's stay in the White House requires comprehensive understanding.

Diplomatic first aid or first harm: The specialized communicative role of foreign temporary migrants for their host region

With the increase of individuals’ global mobility and diversified migration patterns, research on sociological public diplomacy has highlighted the importance of the interpersonal communication of within-border foreign publics (WBFPs) for public diplomacy. The present study aims to help move the research in public diplomacy forward and contribute to empirical and theoretical understanding of temporary migrants (TMs) as a subgroup of WBFPs by examining how they communicate about their host region with their personal networks from home. Using semi-structured interviews with 17 TMs in Macao, this study examines their megaphoning characteristics and two-way communication patterns with their personal networks in their home regions. TMs communicated about Macao based on their firsthand experiences, providing evidence of megaphoning. The communicated content consisted mainly of cultural and life-based topics, including both positive tones and negative problem sharing of issues they immediately encountered in their life in the host region. Two-way rather than one-way communication was found, which reflected TMs’ willingness to adjust their communication pattern after understanding the awareness level and the interest of their communication counterparts. Furthermore, TMs’ two-way communication facilitated the correction and expansion of information their personal networks held about Macao. The present study helps build understanding of the communication behaviors of TMs and their roles as microboundary spanners in public diplomacy.

The COVID-19 Health Crisis And Its Framing: Approaches Used by the Print Media for Coverage

Almost all the countries of the world have witnessed the outbreak of a global health pandemic known as COVID-19 like never before. This pandemic has negatively impacted the economic, health, social, and overall well-being of humanity. The framing analysis approach allows scholars to explore the media’s roles in developing health, economic, political, social, and cultural issues facing society daily. Besides, framing entails an interplay between leading social values and the efforts to tinker with them. This study explored what aspects of framing approaches the major newspapers have created for their readership in Nigeria in understanding the COVID-19 health pandemic that has rattled the entire world since January 2020. The research findings revealed that the six selected newspapers amplified coverage of the pandemic using the frames of economic issues, public healthcare crisis, health workers strike, and corruption with different ferocity and salience. It was also found that the dominant news frames approaches of economic issues, corruption, and public healthcare crisis received negative tone coverage across all the sampled papers at varying degrees. The tone approaches used in framing the COVID-19 pandemic in the selected newspapers were positive, negative, and neutral tones, which are possibly rooted in their editorial policies and political beliefs.

Electron Beam Lithography: CO2‐Based Dual‐Tone Resists for Electron Beam Lithography (Adv. Funct. Mater. 13/2021)

In article number 2007417, Paul F. Nealey, Qiang Li, Guang-Peng Wu, and co-workers discover that CO2-based polycarbonates produced by the copolymerization of CO2 and epoxides could be utilized as qualified positive and negative resists for electron beam lithography, as demonstrated by their features of full sustainability, outstanding sensitivity, high resolution, and the finely manufactured photonic crystal devices in both positive and negative tones.

Auditors' Susceptibility to Affective Bias via Repeated Client Email Exchanges with Mixed Evidence

While auditors used email to communicate with clients before COVID-19, the pandemic has caused firms to increase their reliance on email to facilitate remote client service delivery. Thus, auditors are relying more on email to establish relationships and gather audit evidence. This reliance could result in skewed judgments based on client email content and tone. We conduct a 2x2 within-subjects experiment that manipulates client affect (positive vs. neutral) and evidence consistency (whether the client’s response is consistent or inconsistent with audit evidence). We find auditors’ judgments are positively skewed by positive affective tones used across repeated email correspondences. Importantly, the affective response is engaged, and persists, only once participants are exposed to statements inconsistent with audit evidence. Our results are pervasive across several significant judgments including reliability, risk of material misstatement, skepticism, and trust. Our results inform firms redesigning audit methodologies to ensure audit quality in a remote audit environment.

ЛЕКСИКО-ГРАММАТИЧЕСКИЕ ОСОБЕННОСТИ ИНТЕРНЕТ-ОТЗЫВОВ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ РУССКОГО И АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКОВ)

The article presents an analysis of English and Russian-language Internet reviews of hotels in different countries and cities. The main purpose of the study is to identify the specific features of reviews in two languages in order to formulate clear criteria for automatic determining the tone of the text. On the basis of the existing works of linguists in this field, the author has identified the main directions of research on various issues related to the specifics of Internet reviews. Among others, gender and language specificity of reviews were noted, regardless of comparing their characteristics in two unrelated languages. The research undertaken focuses on the basic means of expressing positive, negative, or neutral tones in two languages, which is an interdisciplinary problem that combines work on the issues of selecting tone criteria for automatic text processing, as well as linguistic problems of language specificity of reviews, allowing to identify the main parameters for automatic tone detection on the basis of the most frequent specific features. The main results of the study are specific distinguishing features of English- and Russian-language reviews, the general and the particular in their characteristics. The most active means involved in the formation of a review are the frequent use of genre-specific lexemes, especially with positive or negative emotional and expressive coloring, combining words in a sentence, the role of negation, grammatical forms of verbs, the use of quantitative adverbs, adjectives in the superlative degree, etc.

Western and Chinese media representation of Africa in COVID-19 news coverage

ABSTRACT In news production and dissemination, media represent communities, countries, and continents by constructing concepts, images, and identities as viewed by selected information sources. It is often assumed that foreign countries are labelled ‘Others’ by global media and misrepresented. This study aims to explore how differently Western and Chinese media source and frame events in Africa. Comparative content analysis of news coverage of COVID-19 prevention in Africa revealed that Western media used African official, African non-official, and Western non-official channels as information sources whereas Chinese media mainly used African and Chinese official sources. The result demonstrated that Western media covered events in Africa in Conflict, Negativity, Human interest, Impact, Eminence, and Novelty frames in positive, neutral, and negative tones whereas Chinese media covered mainly in Impact, Eminence and Novelty frames mostly in positive tone. Overall, the results suggest that Western media coverage of the events is not predominantly negative; and Chinese media coverage is uncommonly affirmative. The findings also suggest that sourcing shapes frames, tones, and representation of ‘Others’ by news media.

Negativity makes us polarized: a longitudinal study of media tone and opinion polarization in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT Public opinion polarization has recently become a prominent social problem in many societies, but whether negative media tone is a possible culprit for opinion polarization remains unclear. Using opinion-polling data on approval ratings of Chief Executive from the Public Opinion Program at the University of Hong Kong, we examined the longitudinal relationship between media tone and opinion polarization in Hong Kong. Opinion polarization is conceptualized as the dispersion and the bimodality of opinion distribution, and is operationalized by opinion distribution variance, kurtosis and a composite score. Positive and negative media tones are coded using computerized text analysis programs. Time series analysis suggests that negative news media tone Granger causes opinion polarization but the reverse causal relationship does not hold. In addition, positive news media tone is not related to opinion polarization.

Exploring the relationship between newspaper coverage of vaccines and childhood vaccination rates in Spain

ABSTRACT Background: Despite the effectiveness of vaccines being well established and recognized by the research community, eleven European countries have adopted mandatory vaccination programs because of vaccine hesitancy. Lack of information and fake news are considered the main reasons. The media are a powerful tool for spreading vaccine-related information. The study of media effects on vaccine uptake has received little attention in Europe. Objective: To explore the association of childhood vaccination rates in Spain with vaccine-related coverage in print media. Methods: A content analysis of newspaper coverage of vaccines was conducted. The study variables were: national vaccination rates, article publication dates, tone and main theme of the articles. We conducted a correlation analysis to assess the association between media coverage and childhood vaccine uptake. Results: While vaccine coverage with positive and neutral tones significantly increased during the study period (p < .001), the number of articles with a negative tone remained unchanged (p = .306). There was a significant and inverse correlation between negative newspaper coverage and childhood vaccine uptake (r = −.771, p < .05). During 2016 and 2017, although the media reporting declined, vaccination rates kept increasing. The most frequent themes were about the development of the Ebola vaccine, and the chickenpox and meningitis vaccine crises. Conclusions: Our findings expand the understanding of media role on vaccination and suggest that the media need to be considered as an important player during vaccination campaigns. The study points to the important educational role of the media in public health.

Bank Management Sentiment and Liquidity Hoarding

We analyze how managerial sentiment embedded in accounting statements affects corporate liquidity hoarding. We choose banks as our empirical setting due to superior detailed accounting data, a comprehensive research-based liquidity hoarding measure, and avoidance of interindustry differences in liquidity needs. We derive managerial sentiment from negative and positive tones in annual reports (10-K) language. We find more negative managerial sentiment results in more liquidity hoarding, consistent with our hypothesis. Further analysis confirms that findings incorporate bank volition rather than being driven only by customers. We also address endogeneity using exogenous weather conditions as instruments. We finally derive potential policy implications.

Social media representation of female genital cutting: A YouTube analysis.

Introduction:Female genital cutting is a practice that has incited controversy and conflicting discourses across the international community. There is a need to analyze social media data on the portrayal of the practice in order to gather insights and inform strategic planning and interventions design. This study aims to explore and describe the portrayal of female genital cutting in the comments section of YouTube comment posts.Methods:This mixed-method study employs a content analysis approach with a sequential exploratory design. A total of 150 YouTube comment posts were analyzed through qualitative content analysis and quantitative descriptive content analysis on NVivo 11 and Microsoft Excel, respectively.Results:Salient subthemes from the qualitative component included likening female genital cutting with male genital cutting, differentiating female genital cutting from male genital cutting, branding female genital cutting as a harmful and unethical practice, branding female genital cutting as a normal tradition, contribution of religion and culture to female genital cutting, gender inequality issues, and the need for education or cultural relativism to change or cope with the practice. The quantitative component identified neutral, positive, mixed, and neutral tones; and formal, colloquial, and mixed language types; as well as targets of stigma with patterns in the themes.Conclusion:The portrayal of female genital cutting in the YouTube comment posts revealed the range of perceptions, beliefs, and opinions of users with various stances on the practice. Study findings are useful for strategic planning and the development of interventions with informative goals. Study findings can also help to gage and evaluate the effectiveness of existing programs that aim to reduce misinformation about female genital cutting or aim to reduce stigmas surrounding the practice.