Abstract
This chapter analyzes patterns in messages posted to several Internet discussion forums from the perspective of the sentiment expressed in them and the collective character of observed emotions. A large set of records describing comments expressed in diverse cyber communities—blogs, forums, IRC channels, and the Digg community—was collected, and sentiment classifiers were used to estimate the emotional valence (positive, negative, or neutral) of each message. A comparison with simple models showed that the data included clusters of comments with the same emotional valence that were much longer than similar clusters created by a random process. This shows that there are emotional interactions between participants so that future posts tend to have the same valence as previous posts. Threads starting from a larger number of negative comments also last longer so negative emotions can be treated as a kind of discussion fuel; when the fuel (negativity) is used up in the discussion, it may finish. Moreover, the amount of user activity in a particular thread correlates positively with the presence of negative emotions expressed by the individual user in the thread. In summary, the analyses describe individual and collective patterns of emotional activities of Web forum users and suggest that negativity is needed to fuel important discussions.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a European Union grant by the 7th Framework Programme, Theme 3: Science of complex systems for socially intelligent ICT. It is part of the CyberEmotions (Collective Emotions in Cyberspace) project (contract 231323). J.A.H, A.Ch. and J.S. acknowledge support from Polish Ministry of Science Grant 1029/7.PR UE/2009/7.
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Chmiel, A. et al. (2014). Collective Emotions Online. In: Agarwal, N., Lim, M., Wigand, R. (eds) Online Collective Action. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-1340-0_4
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