Psychological processes underlying Wikipedia representations of natural and manmade disasters

Abstract

Collective memories are precious resources for the society, because they help strengthening emotional bonding between community members, maintaining groups cohesion, and directing future behavior. Studying how people form their collective memories of emotional upheavals is important in order to better understand people's reactions and the consequences on their psychological health. Previous research investigated the effects of single traumatizing events, but few of them tried to compare different types of traumatic events like natural and man-made disasters. In this paper, interpreting Wikipedia as a collective memory place, we compare articles about natural and human-made disasters employing automated natural language techniques, in order to highlight the different psychological processes underlying users' sensemaking activities.