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This suggests that the course may have been helpful in participants becoming more emotionally accepting in their feelings and attitude towards death.

Analysis of valence, arousal and dominance dimensions of sentiment pre-to-post course participation demonstrated that participants chose significantly happier (more positive) valence words, less arousing (calmer) words, and more dominant (in-control) words to express their feelings about death by the course end. However, words chosen to represent perceptions of others’ feelings towards death suggested that participants perceived others as feeling more negative about death than they do themselves. The results demonstrated that sadness pervades affective responses to death, and that inevitability, peace, and fear were also frequent reactions. We analysed the sentiment of words people chose to describe feelings about death, for themselves, for perceptions of the feelings of ‘others’, and for longitudinal changes over the time-period of exposure to a course about death ( n = 1491). A linguistic lexicon of sentiment norms was applied to activities conducted in an online course for the general-public designed to generate discussion about death. This study provided the first description of emotive attitudes expressed towards death utilising textual sentiment analysis for the dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance. Linguistic sentiment analysis of how people describe their feelings about death can add to knowledge gained from traditional self-reports.

Understanding public attitudes towards death is needed to inform health policies to foster community death awareness and preparedness.