The Use of Latent Semantic Analysis in the Positive Psychology: A Comparison with Twitter Posts

In the last decade, the positive psychology and specifically the 'Positive Youth Development' (PYD) give efforts to positive aspect and strength that performance as protective factors of adjustment problems and psycho-social well-being, such as courage. To better understand the definition of courage in Italian context, 1199 participants were involved in the present study and we asked them to answer to the following question "Courage is...". The participant's definitions of courage were analyzed with the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), in order to study the "fundamental concepts" arising from the population. An analogous comparison with Twitter posts has been also carried out.