Emotional and semantic analysis of economic security discourse narratives

Abstract

This article examines how Lithuanian online media from 2020 to 2024 constructs narratives of economic security through emotional and semantic forms of expression. The issue is grounded in the observation that financial security in the public sphere is increasingly represented not only through factual indicators but also through linguistic, emotional, and visual structures that shape collective perceptions of (in)security. Despite the growing role of media in regulating the emotional climate, there is a lack of systematic research in Lithuania that reveals how emotions and metaphors influence the logic of discourse and citizen responses. This study aims to analyse how narratives of economic security are formed in Lithuanian media through emotional and semantic expression. A mixed-methods approach is applied, combining thematic narrative analysis, emotion classification, latent semantic analysis (LSA), and the principles of critical discourse analysis (CDA). Data were collected from three major news portals: Delfi, 15min, and LRT. Articles were selected based on thematic keywords (“crisis,” “security,” “threat,” “inflation”) and analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The visualisation of emotion frequency was performed using the Python environment. The results revealed five dominant emotions — fear, anxiety, anger, trust, and hope — along with their dynamics in relation to major crisis events. Emotions in the discourse are not random; they are structured through metaphors (“inflation front,” “crisis blow”), discursive oppositions (for example, security versus threat, state versus citizen), and recurring semantic cores. A comparative analysis of the portals highlighted stylistic differences: Delfi tends to use dramatization and affective rhetoric more frequently, 15min balances emotional urgency with analytical structure, while LRT adopts a tone of trust and hope. The study suggests that the economic security discourse in the media functions as a means of emotional governance, helping to shape civic expectations, reinforce representations of (in)security, and influence public responses to crises.