Online emotions
July 29th, 2009 by rbanks
Measuring emotion in cyberspace: Jackson’s death a sad day; Obama’s election a very happy one
“The researchers analyzed the words in nearly 10 million first-person sentences that contained the word “feel”—all posted over the last four years in 2.3 million worldwide blogs. An overall score ranging from 1 to 9 was applied to each sentence, based on a weighted average of the perceived happiness of each key word. (Participants in an earlier study ranked more than 1,000 words on this “happy-unhappy” scale.) “I feel triumphant” would, for example, receive an 8.87. Replace the positive word with “disgusted,” and the score would plummet to 2.45. Or, for the more adventurous blogger, “I feel that paradise is pancakes” would earn an averaged score of 7.4. ” 
Scientific American Blog
