The minute-scale dynamics of online emotions reveal the effects of affect labeling

Rui Fan (), Onur Varol, Ali Varamesh, Alexander Barron, Ingrid A. van de Leemput, Marten Scheffer and Johan Bollen ()
Additional contact information
Rui Fan: Beihang University
Onur Varol: Northeastern University
Ali Varamesh: Indiana University
Alexander Barron: Indiana University
Ingrid A. van de Leemput: Wageningen University
Marten Scheffer: Wageningen University
Johan Bollen: Indiana University

Nature Human Behaviour, 2019, vol. 3, issue 1, 92-100

Abstract: Abstract Putting one’s feelings into words (also called affect labeling) can attenuate positive and negative emotions. Here, we track the evolution of specific emotions for 74,487 Twitter users by analysing the emotional content of their tweets before and after they explicitly report experiencing a positive or negative emotion. Our results describe the evolution of emotions and their expression at the temporal resolution of one minute. The expression of positive emotions is preceded by a short, steep increase in positive valence and followed by short decay to normal levels. Negative emotions, however, build up more slowly and are followed by a sharp reversal to previous levels, consistent with previous studies demonstrating the attenuating effects of affect labeling. We estimate that positive and negative emotions last approximately 1.25 and 1.5 h, respectively, from onset to evanescence. A separate analysis for male and female individuals suggests the potential for gender-specific differences in emotional dynamics.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0490-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nathum:v:3:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41562-018-0490-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0490-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().