The September 27th testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by Supreme Court Nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and one of his accusers, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, stirred many emotions. The testimonies themselves, and the reactions to them, have gripped the media and the nation for almost an entire week.
I wanted to examine the testimonies’ substance and analyze each person’s testimony in an effort to understand the underlying tones and emotions that they evoked.
For this analysis, I programmed the Tone Analyzer using IBM Watson’s Tone Analyzer API (you can read more about the science behind it here) and I used text data, retrieved from the Washington Post transcript. It is worth noting that I consulted with a linguistics expert who encouraged this effort yet noted that some information might be lost due to the fact that text data does not hold intonational information, an element which could contribute significantly to sentiment analysis.
With that in mind, here are the results of the analysis:
Dr. Ford
Tone Analysis of Dr. Ford’s Opening Statement
The visualization below measures the percentage total of an evoked emotion relative to all other emotions that were present in the statement.
We can see below that 30% of Dr. Ford’s statement was mainly analytical, i.e. logical, and she was only angry 1.78% of the time during the entire testimony. She was more sad and tentative than confident.
Intensity of Tone in Dr. Ford’s Opening Statement
The visualization below measures the average score (on a scale of 1-100) of sentences grouped under a tonal label, thereby giving us a measure of that tone’s intensity.
The graph below shows us that she felt intense fear (a score of 75.13 denotes the intensity of those sentences characterized by fear). She was also quite tentative, or hesitant, yet she was analytical, or logical, in her delivery.
Judge Kavanaugh
Tone Analysis of Judge Kavanaugh’s Opening Statement
The visualization below measures the percentage total of an evoked emotion relative to all other emotions that were present in the statement.
We can see below that Judge Kavanaugh was largely analytical in his delivery, with confident coming in at a distant second place. His third most exhibited emotion according to the analysis is sadness. Although Anger is lowest overall for Kavanaugh (7.57%), it is significantly larger than the amount of anger exhibited by Dr. Ford (1.78%).
Intensity of Tone in Judge Kavanaugh’s Opening Statement
The visualization below measures the average score (on a scale of 1-100) of sentences grouped under a tonal label, thereby giving us a measure of that tone’s intensity.
Judge Kavanaugh felt almost every sentence very intensely and was certainly emotive in his discourse. He felt incredibly tentative (a score of 82.66 denotes the intensity of those sentences characterized as tentative), so his most significant tone was one of hesitance. His second and third most intense emotions according to the analysis were fear and confidence. Additionally, he was significantly more angry in his statement,
at 62% intensity, than Dr. Ford, whose anger registered an average of 53% intensity.
Once again, this analysis is not necessarily all encompassing, as it is based solely on text data. It would certainly bolster the analysis if further work were conducted on phonetic data. I coded each sentence as having only one emotion for the clarity of results, however, I would recommend further analyses to account for the possibility of multiple emotions in sentences.
Given this information, I was also curious about who had spoken the most during the hearing, so I calculated it in the chart below.
Who Spoke the Most?
We can see below that Judge Kavanaugh spoke the most during the hearing with a total of 466 recorded statements, followed closely by the consulting prosecutor, Ms. Mitchell, at 405, followed by Dr. Ford at 368.
Cover Image Source: Time Magazine.
You can find all the python code in the notebook below: