Analytical thinking and clout in the context of COVID-19: psychological analysis of the verbal behaviours.

The discourses of the leaders of eight countries regarding prevention and vision of the COVID-19 pandemic were examined in terms of analytical thinking and clout using psycholinguistic analysis. In the context of this pandemic, little psychological research has been produced regarding the psycholinguistic analysis of populations, so this study of verbal behaviour aims to characterize the psychological dimensions and the impact of the discourses. Resorting to a corpus of 39,000 words, a psycholinguistic analysis of eight discourses of world leaders in two periods of the first half of 2020 was conducted using a qualitative thematic analysis by combining topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Two language functions were examined: analytical thinking and clout (social and political empowerment given by leaders to the people). The qualitative thematic analysis focused on: (1) identifying, interpreting (encoding) and analyzing variation in the analytical thinking of the leaders in two periods of the first half of 2020, through verbal discourses collected from official government sources; (2) characterizing words related to clout pattern for the same countries in that period. We conclude that there were fewer analytical discourses in period 2 when the levels of clout increased.