ArticleJMIR public health and surveillance2019
Differences in Emotional and Pain-Related Language in Tweets About Dentists and Medical Doctors: Text Analysis of Twitter Content.
Article in JMIR public health and surveillance, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 18 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Relationship Between the Perceived Personality Traits of Dentists, Dental Anxiety, Negative Stories, and Negative Experiences with Dental Treatment: A Cross-Sectional Study.Dentistry journal · 2025Article
- Article
- Extraction of Explicit and Implicit Cause-Effect Relationships in Patient-Reported Diabetes-Related Tweets From 2017 to 2021: Deep Learning Approach.JMIR medical informatics · 2022Article
- The Influence of Stereotypes on Trust in Doctors from Patients' Perspective: The Mediating Role of Communication.Psychology research and behavior management · 2022Article
- Emotional effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on oral surgery procedures: a social media analysis.Journal of dental anesthesia and pain medicine · 2021Article
- Determination of Patient Sentiment and Emotion in Ophthalmology: Infoveillance Tutorial on Web-Based Health Forum Discussions.Journal of medical Internet research · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundSocial 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.
objectiveThis 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.
methodsTwitter 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.
resultsOver 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).
conclusionsThe 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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