Is Happiness Contagious Online? A Case of Twitter and the 2010 Winter Olympics

Abstract

Is happiness contagious online? To answer this question, this paper investigates the posting behavior of users on Twitter.com, a popular online service for sharing short messages. Specifically, we use automated sentiment analysis to study a large sample of over 46,000 Twitter messages that reference the 2010 Winter Olympics. We determined that there are more positive messages than negative, and that positive messages are more likely to be forwarded than negative messages. However, we were not able to confirm with a reliable degree of certainty that the emotional context of messages is directly related to the user's position in the Twitter network. It is likely that there are other factors involved as well. For example, we found that negative users were more prolific posters than positive users, suggesting their more argumentative and passionate nature. This paper concludes with some implications for the Twitter community and a description of our follow-up study.

Perspective Matters: Sharing of Crisis Information in Social Media

“…Moreover, as we found strong effects of social distance on information sharing when subjects were imagining themselves or John in Fukushima, we can manipulate perspective taking in a different location, such as "You" or "John" in Melbourne, Australia, to tease apart the effects of perspective taking and location on information sharing in social media. In addition, besides collecting and analyzing people's emotional experiences after reading the messages including crisis information, in future research we can also analyze the content of perhaps a larger and more diverse sample of tweets [12]. By doing so, we can link the valence of messages prepared by "speakers" to the subjective responses of "listeners" through the communication in social media, and use the results to predict people's tendency to share crisis information.…”

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

“…Emotions have been shown to be contagious [29], which also applies in an online environment [36,47], and they are linked to rumor spreading behavior [68].…”

Detecting sociosemantic communities by applying social network analysis in tweets

“…In general, studies analyzing tweets by combining different sentiment analysis algorithms have been able to give new insights about patterns and motivations behind human social behavior, preferences, and interactions (e.g., Chung and Mustafaraj 2011;Dodds and Danforth 2010;Gruzd et al 2011;Kramer 2010).…”