Rethinking Emotional Desensitization to Violence: Methodological and Theoretical Insights From Social Media Data

While the term "desensitization" has been employed in the studies of media and real world violence, its longitudinal effect is largely unexplored due to methodological difficulties. This paper applies computerized linguistic analysis to study the longitudinal emotional desensitization towards gun violence using Twitter data. The results show that there is a decline in overall negative emotions when people tweet about gun violence during 2012-2014, and a case study of six school shootings confirmed the finding through more nuanced analysis. Moreover, the findings expand the previous unified conceptualization of emotional desensitization. Despite the overall desensitization trend, people show a significant decrease in disgust, sadness, and anger, yet notable increase in anxiety towards gun violence. The results provide evidence for longitudinal emotional desensitization, and call for more careful conceptualization of the term.