The Words of Morality: An Italian Adaptation of the Moral Foundations Dictionary 2.0 for the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count

Abstract

The present study provides an Italian-adapted version of the Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) 2.0, namely Italian version of the MFD (it-MFD), for use in the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count software. The MFD 2.0 was translated and adapted from English into Italian following a multistep process. Subsequently, the reviewers compared the output with the original text to identify semantic discrepancies. Independent judges then evaluated the relevance of each word to the five moral foundations, and only the words assessed as both relevant and with a high level of agreement between the judges were included in the final version. The resulting it-MFD comprises 2,881 words. To evaluate the tool's effectiveness, we applied it to a sample of salient texts originally written in Italian and for which official English translations were available. The results are presented and discussed.

Keywords

moral foundations dictionary moral foundations theory linguistic inquiry word count natural language processing

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Asprino

De Giorgis

Gangemi

Bulla

(2022). Uncovering values: Detecting latent moral content from natural language with explainable and non-trained methods. In Proceedings of DeeLIO 2022. Università di Bologna.

Atari

Haidt

Graham

Koleva

Stevens

S. T.

Dehghani

(2023). Morality beyond the WEIRD: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(5), 1157–1188. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000470

Bektas

M. S.

(2023). The moral foreign language effect: Do languages influence how we make moral decisions?. Philosophy International Journal, 6(2), 000297. https://doi.org/10.23880/phij-16000297

Bobbio

Nencini

Sarrica

(2011). II moral foundation questionnaire: Analisi della struttura fattoriale della versione italiana [the moral foundations questionnaire: Factorial structure of the Italian version]. Giornale di Psicologia, 5(1-2), 7–18. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2012-24974-001

Boies

Fiset

Gill

(2015). Communication and trust are key: Unlocking the relationship between leadership and team performance and creativity. The Leadership Quarterly, 26(6), 1080–1094. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2015.07.007

Bos

Minihold

(2022). The ideological predictors of moral appeals by European political elites; an exploration of the use of moral rhetoric in multiparty systems. Political Psychology, 43(1), 45–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12739

Boyd

Wilson

Pennebaker

Kosinski

Stillwell

Mihalcea

(2015). Values in words: Using language to evaluate and understand personal values. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 9(1), 31–40. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v9i1.14589

Brady

W. J.

Wills

J. A.

Jost

J. T.

Tucker

J. A.

Van Bavel

J. J.

(2017). Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(28), 7313–7318. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1618923114

Bulla

Giorgis

S. D.

Gangemi

Marinucci

Mongiovì

(2022). Detection of morality in tweets based on the moral foundation theory. In In international Conference on Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science (pp. 1–13). Springer Nature Switzerland.

10.

Carvalho

Okuno

H. Y.

Baroni

Guedes

(2020, November). A Brazilian Portuguese moral foundations dictionary for fake news classification. In 2020 39th International Conference of the Chilean Computer Science Society (SCCC) (pp. 1–5). IEEE.

11.

Cheng

C. Y.

Zhang

(2023). C-mfd 2.0: Developing a Chinese moral foundation dictionary. Computational Communication Research, 5(2), 1. https://doi.org/10.5117/ccr2023.2.10.chen

12.

Day

M. V.

Fiske

S. T.

Downing

E. L.

Trail

T. E.

(2014). Shifting liberal and conservative attitudes using moral foundations theory. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(12), 1559–1573. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167214551152

13.

De Freitas

DeScioli

Nemirow

Massenkoff

Pinker

(2017). Kill or die: Moral judgment alters linguistic coding of causality. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43(8), 1173. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000369

14.

de Kleijn

(2024). Implications of detection of moral foundations in written text [Master's thesis, University of Twente]. https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/99784

15.

De Vries

R. E.

Bakker-Pieper

Oostenveld

(2010). Leadership=communication? The relations of leaders’ communication styles with leadership styles, knowledge sharing and leadership outcomes. Journal of Business and Psychology, 25, 367–380. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-009-9140-2

16.

Dudău

D. P.

Sava

F. A.

(2021). Performing multilingual analysis with linguistic inquiry and word count 2015 (LIWC2015): An equivalence study of four languages. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 570568. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.570568

17.

Feinberg

Willer

(2015). From gulf to bridge: When do moral arguments facilitate political influence? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(12), 1665–1681. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167215607842

18.

Frimer

J. A.

Boghrati

Haidt

Graham

Dehgani

(2019). Moral foundations dictionary for linguistic analyses 2.0 . [Unpublished manuscript]. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/EZN37

19.

Frisari

F. V.

Bonora

Parisse

Livi

Kosic

(2025). Italian adaptation and psychometric analysis of the moral foundations questionnaire 2. Current Psychology: A Journal for Diverse Perspectives on Diverse Psychological Issues, 44, 2237–2246. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-025-07310-3

20.

Fulgoni

Carpenter

Ungar

Preoţiuc-Pietro

(2016, May). An empirical exploration of moral foundations theory in partisan news sources. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), p. 3730–3736.

21.

Garten

Boghrati

Hoover

Johnson

K. M.

Dehghani

(2016). Morality between the lines: Detecting moral sentiment in text. In Proceedings of the 25th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-16), p. 3712–3718.

22.

Gilligan

(1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674037618

23.

Graham

Haidt

Koleva

Motyl

Iyer

Wojcik

S. P.

Ditto

P. H.

(2013). Chapter two - Moral foundations theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 55–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-407236-7.00002-4

24.

Graham

Haidt

Nosek

B. A.

(2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1029–1046. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015141

25.

Graham

Nosek

B. A.

Haidt

Iyer

Koleva

Ditto

P. H.

(2011). Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 366–385. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021847

26.

Grover

Bayraktaroglu

Mark

Rho

E. H. R.

(2019). Moral and affective differences in U.S. immigration policy debate on Twitter. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 28(3-4), 317–355. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-019-09357-w

27.

Haidt

(2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814

28.

Haidt, J. (2007). The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science, 316(5827), 998–1002. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1137651

29.

Haidt

(2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Vintage Books.

30.

Haidt

Bjorklund

. (2008). Social intuitionists answer six questions about morality. In Sinnott-Armstrong

(Ed.), Moral psychology, Vol. 2: The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity (pp. 181–217). MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7573.003.0006

31.

Haidt

Graham

(2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20, 98–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-007-0034-z

32.

Haidt

Graham

Joseph

(2009). Above and below left–right: Ideological narratives and moral foundations. Psychological Inquiry, 20(2-3), 110–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/10478400903028573

33.

Haidt

Joseph

(2004). Intuitive ethics: How innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues. Daedalus, 133(4), 55–66. https://doi.org/10.1162/0011526042365555

34.

Haidt

Joseph

(2007). The moral mind: How five sets of innate intuitions guide the development of many culture-specific virtues, and perhaps even modules. In Carruthers

Laurence

Stich

(Eds.), The innate mind: Vol. 3. Foundations and the future (pp. 367–392). Oxford University Press.

35.

Hirsh

J. B.

DeYoung

C. G.

Peterson

J. B.

(2010). Compassionate liberals and polite conservatives: Associations of agreeableness with political ideology and moral values. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(5), 655–664. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167210366854

36.

Hopp

F. R.

Fisher

J. T.

Cornell

Huskey

Weber

(2021). The extended moral foundations dictionary (eMFD): Development and applications of a crowd-sourced approach to extracting moral intuitions from text. Behavior Research Methods, 53, 232–246. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-020-01433-0

37.

Huang

Yang

Zhu

(2024). Moral salience in film reviews associated with film success: An analysis of 1.6 million reviews. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 37(1), 12–25. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000416

38.

Hughes

(2021). krippendorffsalpha: An R package for measuring agreement using Krippendorff's alpha coefficient. arXiv preprint. https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.12170

39.

Hull

Warren

Smith

(2024). Politics makes bastards of us all: Why moral judgment is politically situational. Political Psychology, 45(6), 1013–1029. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12954

40.

Husson

Palma

(2025). Broadening the study of morality in multiparty settings through a novel dictionary translation and validation methodology. Political Psychology, 46(3), 487–510. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.13019

41.

Imelwaty

Gunawan

Kuraedah

Mardiana

Wardhana

D. E. C.

Boulahnane

(2024). Moral values in Indonesian primary school thematic textbooks: The marrying of language appraisal and moral foundation theories. Education, 52(5), 690–702. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2022.2120771

42.

Iyer

Koleva

Graham

Ditto

P. H.

Haidt

(2010). Understanding libertarian morality: The psychological roots of an individualist ideology. Available at https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1665934

43.

Joullié

J. E.

Gould

A. M.

Spillane

Luc

(2021). The language of power and authority in leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 32(4), Article 101491. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2020.101491

44.

Jung

J. H.

Clifford

(2024). Varieties of values: Moral values are uniquely divisive. American Political Science Review, 119(1), 462–478. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003055424000443

45.

Kennedy

Atari

Davani

A. M.

Hoover

Omrani

(2021). Moral concerns are differentially observable in language. Cognition, 212, Article 104718. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104696

46.

Kim

K. R.

Kang

J. S.

Yun

(2012). Moral intuitions and political orientation: Similarities and differences between South Korea and the United States. Psychological Reports, 111(1), 173–185. https://doi.org/10.2466/17.09.21.PR0.111.4.173-185

47.

Kohlberg, L. (1981). The philosophy of moral development: Moral stages and the idea of justice (Essays on Moral Development, Vol. 1). Harper & Row.

48.

Kohlberg, L. (1984). The psychology of moral development: The nature and validity of moral stages (Essays on Moral Development, Vol. 2). Harper & Row.

49.

Krippendorff

(2004). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology. Sage publications.

50.

Liu

E. H.

Chambers

C. R.

Moore

(2023). Fifty years of research on leader communication: What we know and where we are going. The Leadership Quarterly, 34(6), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2023.101734

51.

Markowitz

D. M.

Hancock

J. T.

Bailenson

J. N.

(2024). Linguistic markers of inherently false AI communication and intentionally false human communication: Evidence from hotel reviews. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 43(1), 63–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X231200201

52.

Matsuo

Sasahara

Taguchi

Karasawa

(2019). Development and validation of the Japanese moral foundations dictionary. PloS One, 14(3), Article e0213343. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0213343

53.

Medhat

Hassan

Korashy

(2014). Sentiment analysis algorithms and applications: A survey. Ain Shams Engineering Journal, 5(4), 1093–1113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asej.2014.04.011

54.

Miller

(2008). The roots of morality. Science, 320(5877), 734–737. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.320.5877.734

55.

Mokhberian

Abeliuk

Cummings

Lerman

(2020). Moral framing and ideological bias of news. In Social informatics: 12th international conference, SocInfo 2020, Pisa, Italy, October 6–9, 2020, proceedings 12 (pp. 206–219). Springer International Publishing.

56.

Mooijman

Hoover

Lin

Dehghani

(2018). Moralization in social networks and the emergence of violence during protests. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(6), 389–396. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0353-0

57.

Onan

(2018). Sentiment analysis on twitter based on ensemble of psychological and linguistic feature sets. Balkan Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 6(2), 69–77. https://doi.org/10.17694/bajece.419538

58.

Pennebaker

J. W.

Francis

M. E.

Booth

R. J.

(2001). Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC): LIWC2001. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

59.

Reiter-Haas

Kopeinik

Lex

(2021). Studying moral-based differences in the framing of political tweets. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 15(1), 1085–1089. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18135

60.

Rizzoli

(2023). The risk co-de model: Detecting psychosocial processes of risk perception in natural language through machine learning. Journal of Computational Social Science, 7, 217–239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-023-00235-6

61.

Roy

Goldwasser

(2021, June). Analysis of nuanced stances and sentiment towards entities of US politicians through the lens of moral foundation theory. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media, p. 1–13.

62.

Sagi

Dehghani

(2014). Measuring moral rhetoric in text. Social Science Computer Review, 32(2), 132–144. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439313506837

63.

Shogan

C. J.

(2007). The moral rhetoric of American presidents (Vol. 17). Texas A&M University Press.

64.

Shweder

R. A.

Haidt

(2000). The cultural psychology of the emotions: Ancient and new. In Lewis

Haviland-Jones

J. M.

(Eds.), Handbook of emotions (2nd ed., pp. 397–414). Guilford.

65.

Shweder

R. A.

Much

N. C.

Mahapatra

Park

(1997). The “big three” of morality (autonomy, community, and divinity) and the “big three” explanations of suffering. In Brandt

A. M.

Rozin

(Eds.), Morality and health (pp. 119–169). Routledge.

66.

Tausczik

Y. R.

Pennebaker

J. W.

(2010). The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29(1), 24–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X09351676

67.

Tzelgov

Dumitrescu

(2018). ‘Taking back control’, again: The effect of moral foundation arguments and partisan cues on attitudes towards a people’s vote. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3254506

68.

Van Leeuwen

Park

J. H.

(2009). Perceptions of social dangers, moral foundations, and political orientation. Personality and Individual Differences, 47(3), 169–173. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2009.02.017

69.

Voelkel

J. G.

Feinberg

(2018). Morally reframed arguments can affect support for political candidates. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9(8), 917–924. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617729408

70.

Wang

Liu

(2021). Different pathways to identify moral framing from media content: A response to Hopp and Weber. Communication Monographs, 88(3), 380–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2021.1963516

71.

Guo

(2023). Objectivity and moral judgment in us news narratives: A natural language processing analysis of ‘culture war’ coverage. Journal of Media Ethics, 38(1), 16–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/23736992.2022.2159409

72.

Cameron

G. T.

(2023). Tracking moral divergence with DDR in presidential debates over 60 years. Journal of Computational Social Science, 6, 339–357. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-023-00198-8

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.03 MB