AVERT Pop-Up Seminar

Dr David Kernot

In determining if the inner turmoil facing a suicide terrorist can be observed from the sentiment of their writing prior to their attacks, their final manifestos and suicide notes are compared to normal blogger’s posts. Anger and negative sentiment is measured and compared to a psycho-linguistic technique RPAS, which reflects a person’s level of cognitive function, to see if RPAS can be used to predict an attack. In this exploratory study, findings highlight RPAS, anger, and negative emotion can discriminate attackers from normal bloggers, and in several attackers using RPAS, a tipping point phenomena occurs prior to the attacks against rising anger and negative sentiment.

Bio

David Kernot obtained his PhD in Political Science and International Relations from the Australian National University’s National Security College where he examined linguistic markers of cognitive decline in people, including depression and anxiety and focused on identifying tipping points that might indicate self-radicalisation in lone actors. David works in the Defence Science and Technology’s Intelligence Analytics Branch and leads the organisation’s countering violent extremism research programme.