Emotion extraction and entrainment in social media: The case of U.S. immigration and border security

Abstract

Emotion plays an important role in shaping public policy and business decisions. The growth of social media has allowed people to express their emotion publicly in an unprecedented manner. Textual content and user linkages fostered by social media networks can be used to examine emotion types, intensity, and contagion. However, research into how emotion evolves and entrains in social media that influence security issues is scarce. In this research, we developed an approach to analyzing emotion expressed in political social media. We compared two methods of emotion analysis to identify influential users and to trace their contagion effects on public emotion, and report preliminary findings of analyzing the emotion of 105,304 users who posted 189,012 tweets on the U.S. immigration and border security issues in November 2014. The results provide strong implication for understanding social actions and for collecting social intelligence for security informatics. This research should contribute to helping decision makers and security personnel to use public emotion effectively to develop appropriate strategies.

Emotions Trump Facts: The Role of Emotions in on Social Media: A Literature Review

“…Plutchik's wheel of emotions defines basic emotions as well as milder variants of them, and describes how they relate to each other [74] (used in e.g. [18,57]), and Ekkekakis defined a hierarchical structure of the affective domain, combining the idea or core emotions and dimensions [22] (used in e.g. [79]).…”

Media and Urban Governance: The Quest for Sustainable Cities and Communities

“…Chung and Zeng argue that social media provides opportunities for policymakers to gauge public opinion. Usually, to understand public opinion, policymakers, researchers, and bureaucrats explore human contacts and networks which are limited and representative only, whereas social media transforms these limitations and enables larger participation of people in the public policy discourse (16). Psychographic analysis of the opinion leaders in the social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook along with content and hashtag analysis and other algorithmic techniques, people's perceptions and sentiments on various issues can be effectively understood and policy actions can be taken accordingly.…”