Want more comments on your blog posts? A higher follower tally on Twitter? Then be prepared to resort to to anger and upset people. That鈥檚 the conclusion of a study into the role emotions play in online interaction.
A group of Slovenian and British researchers used something called 鈥渟entiment analysis鈥� to identify emotional content in posts left on the and the link-sharing website .
The team鈥檚 algorithms look for features such as keywords, emoticons, and subtle linguistic markers such as misspellings, and use the results to calculate a 鈥渉appiness score鈥� for each post.
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They have found that long conversation threads are overwhelmingly more emotionally negative than short ones, with happiness scores decreasing logarithmically with the number of messages. What鈥檚 more, long conversations almost always start with negative comments.
鈥淚f you want a long chat, don鈥檛 start by saying 鈥業 love this!鈥�, at least not online,鈥� says , head of the Statistical Cybermetrics research group in Wolverhampton, UK.
Self-organised behaviour
The researchers also noticed that avalanches of negative emotion 鈥� floods of messages with low happiness scores, spurred by a single post 鈥� produce self-organised behaviour amongst users.
Negative emotions accelerate the number of messages sent by users, in turn generating social groups from nowhere, says Thelwall. A single post can quickly generate a community of feeling if it is provocative enough.
In fact, this is all typically human behaviour. 鈥淭here is evidence that group cohesiveness may be related to negative feelings about others,鈥� agrees , a psychologist at the University of Westminster in London. 鈥淢embers of an online community might unite around a perceived attack on them or some aspect of their identity.鈥�
Thankfully, the researchers have some advice for those that would rather steer clear of bad feeling online. 鈥淲e鈥檝e seen that the least vigorous discussions tend to be about ageing rock stars,鈥� says Thelwall.
Journal reference: The researchers have recently added two papers to the physics archive: ,
