Negative emotions "fuel" many online discussions

The project "Cyberemotions - Collective Emotions in Cyberspace", which began in 2009 and is funded by the EU, involves scientists from various fields of science, associated with nine research centres in 6 countries.

 

"We wanted to see if the emotions move through the Internet. (...) How people affect each other emotionally, without seeing each other, remaining anonymous" - explained in an interview with PAP project coordinator, Prof. Janusz Hołyst of the Faculty of Physics, Warsaw University of Technology. He added that it was not clear whether these indirect interactions actually existed.

 

Researchers involved in "Cyberemotions" carry out statistical analysis of comments on the Internet: they analyse millions of posts and look for relationships between them. It is possible with the SentiStrenght application developed in the project, which is capable of determining with high probability, based on almost any text (for now only in selected languages, including English and German) if a person wanted to express a positive, negative or objective assessment. The application has already attracted attention of many companies worldwide.

 

The researchers analysed mainly the comments on English language sites, but Prof. Hołyst explained that similar phenomena can also be observed on Polish websites.

 

What emotions dominate the Internet? According to Hołyst, large websites, particularly those on which users remain anonymous (in the UK, for example, the BBC and blog portals, in Poland it would be for example, Onet.pl or Gazeta.pl) are dominated by negative comments. The situation is different, however, on specialized websites, where Internet users seek the advice or opinion. There, objective and positive comments appear more often.

 

The study showed for example, that negative emotions can extend life of some online communities.

 

"We've seen it on many websites. The more negative the beginning of the discussion is, the more negative posts, the longer the discussion will be" - the physicist explained. He added with time there are more and more neutral and positive entries. "When negative posts burn out, discussion dies. Negative emotions are a kind of fuel for many anonymous communities, though not for all of them" - he told PAP. He noted that this situation applies in particular to those websites, where users are anonymous.

 

According to Hołyst, owners of many websites intuitively understand the meaning of negative comments and try to heat up the atmosphere by employing so-called trolls, whose job is to provoke people negative emotions. "We are even able to see that artificial emotions are added on some websites to increase their popularity" - said the scientist.

 

According to the "Cyberemotions" project coordinator, slightly different mechanisms apply to comments on specialist websites. There are much less negative opinions, objective comments dominated, and as the discussion continues, there are more and more positive posts. But, as in anonymous discussions, if positive statements begin to dominate, the discussion ends.

 

"If the owner of an advisory site wants to keep the discussion alive, he should make an objective comment, add a problem that people will start to analyse, and that will keep users in discussion" - advised the researcher.

 

The researchers also drew attention to the important role of minority emotions on the Internet.

 

"For example, if a given site has a majority of negative comments, but there is a group of people who express positive views, the attraction is much greater between the minority positive opinions than between negative emotions" - said Prof. Janusz Hołyst. He clarified that several consecutive comments with the same emotional nature create more "mass". Thus the chance increases that the next statement will be of similar nature. The probability that after three positive statements there will be the fourth is larger than that after one positive there will be another.

 

The researcher believes that the conclusions of the project could be of use to discussion group members. In the future, a special program could, for example, warn users that the level of negative statements is too high and may cause the group to break. Another idea is a special application that would automatically analyse the level of emotion in written mail. Before the email is sent, it could warn the sender that his message carries for too much negative emotion.

 

But why is the study of cyberemotions of interest to physicists? Prof. Hołyst explained that they are interested in to what extent "emotional impact" can be described in a mathematical form. "Physics attempts to organize events around us, and build models for them. Mathematicians will not do this" - concluded the researcher.

 

Source: PAP - Science and Scholarship in Poland, Ludwika Tomala