MANILA (UPDATED) - A shift to a federal form of government has been a much-talked about topic since Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency in 2016.

Ateneo de Manila University political psychology Professor Dr. Cristina Montiel said Friday that emotional landscape will be critical in the transition to a possible new form of government.

"The ongoing discussions about federalism that we hear are related to the nature of federalism but not to the human landscape of the transition," said Montiel.

In a round table discussion called "Collective Emotions about Philippine Federalism: Media-based Big Data Analysis" on Friday, Montiel and Joshua Uyheng of the Mathematics Department presented their collaborative study.

In their research, they found that federalism-related topics that evoke emotions include "Tatay Digong", which is a term of endearment on Duterte, as well as the phrases "Imperial Manila", "political dynasties", and "Charter Change".

"Our research is about what federalism-related topics arouse public emotions," said Montiel.

They focused on social media, particularly Facebook comments from both pro- and anti-administration blogs and opinion-editorials of news sites. The study was conducted from June 2016 to May 2018 with data collected from 9,071 Facebook comments and 259 opinion columns.

Uycheng said that their data extraction procedures included standard web scraping scripts, natural language pre-processing, and other social computing procedures.

On social media, the focus on "Tatay Digong," is associated with euphoria and yearning from those who favor federalism. "Yearning for a better life. Euphoria for having a very good tatay."

But "fear" was another dominant emotion among those who do not show support for federalism.

"Dynastic leaders, Congress and Charter Change...they are accompanied by feeling of fear," said Montiel. "What we’re missing is there's a much stronger emotion and it’s around one person."

She also noted the differences in language where Facebook comments use the variant "Federalismo" instead of "Federalism" as used by opinion columns.

"The emotional language bifurcates not about yes or no; not about social media and opinion. It bifurcates along culture and political language and collective emotion that's raw, personalized and another that's intellectualized," Montiel said.

Montiel also added "Do we talk about the charter, perhaps; but there is a much more powerful force that will set the way of life we will have in relation to this federalism transition period and that is the human landscape, political landscape and in fact, the emotional narrative is critical.”