Emotional attitudes towards procrastination in people: A large-scale sentiment-focused crawling analysis

Abstract Procrastination has been increasingly becoming the most prevailing behavior in humans globally. However, how we regard procrastination still remains ambiguous. Thus, the major purpose of this study is to identify people's emotional attitudes towards procrastination. Further, we also aim to clarify the potential role of such sentiments to procrastination. Using the domain-focus web crawling in social medias including Facebook, Twitter, Sina Weibo and Baidu Tieba, in conjunction with theory-driven data source theory, 5,613,807 users and resultant 18,809,276 original posts were scraped. Then, sentiment-focus analysis embodied in the natural language processing (NLP) algorithm was performed to quantify emotional attitudes. Results substantiated our hypothesis heavily by showing that procrastination was evaluated as negative behavior significantly. Further, significant interactions of age × gender and gender × education were found for people's negative emotions towards procrastination, showing more negative emotional attitudes towards procrastination in educated-less males. Ultimately, predictive role of such sentiments to procrastination was proven in the longitudinal mixed model. This study provides robust evidence to clarify the negative emotional attitudes towards procrastination in people, and further sheds light on the predictive role of such sentiments for it.