Psycholinguistic dictionaries or lexicons have been used for text analysis in a variety of domains, from analyzing terrorist manifestos to congressional speeches. Methods for developing these dictionaries generally focus on identifying lexemes – single semantic units – that map to psychological categories such as health (containing words like yoga, disease, neurosis), positive sentiment (happy, joy), or interpersonal conflict (fight, kill). The focus on single lexemes neglects multiword expressions (such as kick the bucket, by and large, birds of a feather), which constitute a significant portion of any language and offer similar insight into human psychology and cognition. This paper proposes a methodology for developing lexicons of multiword expressions of psychological significance, and addresses the considerations specific to identifying and validating multiword expressions. Using this methodology, I developed two lexicons of multiword expressions that correspond to two cognitive processes and used them to analyze qualitative text data discussing belief in conspiracy theories.

Loaded language is an umbrella term for words, phrases, and overall rhetorical strategies that have strong emotional implications and intent to sway others. Belief in conspiracy theories is tied to a range of strong emotions (van Prooijen and Douglas, 2018). Accordingly, language with strong emotional and persuasive content may be expressed by people experiencing the strong emotions associated with conspiracy theorizing. In this research, we examine multiple types of loaded language in two online parenting forums: one historically against vaccination, and another historically accepting of vaccination. It is well-established that conspiracy theories are the most influential contributor to anti-vaccination views (Hornsey et al., 2018) and anti-vaccination beliefs are strongly correlated with belief in unrelated conspiracy theories (Goldberg & Richey, 2020). Results indicate that users of an anti-vaccination forum use a greater frequency of loaded language to express themselves than users of a vaccination-neutral forum.

Previous research found that loaded language (i.e., words, phrases, and overall rhetorical strategies that have strong emotional implications and intent to sway others) is used with significantly greater frequency by users of an online anti-vaccination forum compared to users of a vaccination-neutral forum. Our present research expands on these findings by examining the presence of loaded language on forums dedicated to discussing a broader range of conspiratorial topics. We compare loaded language usage on the subreddit r/conspiracy with usage on r/science and r/wallstreetbets. Results corroborate the previous literature. We additionally examined the presence of loaded language in a dataset from the alt-tech social networking platform Parler on January 6, 2021, when the U.S. Capitol was attacked because of conspiracy theories regarding the 2020 Presidential Election. Results show that loaded language, whose usage is linked to the cognitive motivations underlying belief in conspiracy theories, is a linguistic marker of conspiracy theorizing.