Emotion in Social Media

Implications for Social, Behavioral & Data Sciences

Emotion is central to our highest hopes and deepest fears about social media, from the outrage and hope that fuels movements like Black Lives Matter to the hostility that silenced women in Gamergate. Emotion is the amusement that spreads with the latest meme, the envy of receiving the highlights of friends’ lives while we carry on with ordinary life, and the calm of daily life that, counterintuitively, is reflected as one of the dominant emotions of social media. In this talk, I address key questions about emotion in social media, from the emotions we express in status updates, to the emotions we experience while browsing social media, to how well our emotional lives can be inferred from what we say in our status updates. Findings help resolve conflicts between important lines of research and point us toward a higher level of complexity and nuance in our discourse about social media.