Using Emotional Text Mining to explore the cultural representation of organ donation in the Spanish and Italian culture.

Spanish legislation (30/1979, 27 October, on Organ Extraction and Transplant) introduced presumed consent in 1979 (Quigley M, Brazier M, Chadwick R, et al, 2008), whereby given the failure to register consent in life the state presumes consent. This model is divided into the strong presumption, whereby the absence of denial is equivalent to consent, and the weak presumption whereby a donation is presumed but the family is consulted to see if there are possible objections to the procedure. In some countries, as in the case of Spain, although the legislation establishes presumed consent, in practice informed consent is adopted ( dos Santos M. J. & Feito L., 2018). Since the creation of the Spanish model, in Spain, there has been an increase of 14.3 donors p.m.p. This model has also been used in other countries, such as Italy, failing to achieve the same results, due to socio - cultural factors. With this work we tried to investigate the cultural differences in the representation of organ donation. To achieve this goal, Emotional Text Mining (Cordella et al., 2014; Greco, 2016) was used with T-Lab software (Lancia, 2017). ETM has also been used by several authors in the field of psychology (Battisti et al., 2012; Cordella et al., 2014; Gennaro et al., 2012; Greco et al., 2012; Salvatore et al., 2012; Vercelli et al., 2014) and developed from the work of Carli and Paniccia (2002). We considered 571 Spanish newspapers from "El Pais" and "El Mundo" and 846 Italian newspapers from "Il Corriere" and "La Repubblica", published between 2001 and 2021. The results obtained suggest that the representation of organ donation is influenced not only by media and social information to which the population is subjected, but also and above all by socio-cultural factors. In fact, in the textual analysis of Spanish newspapers have been identified areas more related to the sense of community and unity, about the topic, while with regard to Italian newspapers has emerged the vision of this practice as a product of the health system but also a paralysis of the state in the face of advancing time and technology. In conclusion, understanding the cultural vision of organ donation, through ETM, will allow us to improve the deficient areas of the system and achieve important results. Thus, adequate information and news dissemination on the topic can better engage the population in the process of organ donation in addition to generating substantial differences in consent rates.