Influence Analysis of Emotional Behaviors and User Relationships Based on Twitter Data

One of the main purposes for which people use Twitter is to share emotions with others. Users can easily post a message as a short text when they experience emotions such as pleasure or sadness. Such tweet serves to acquire empathy from followers, and can possibly influence others’ emotions. In this study, we analyze the influence of emotional behaviors to user relationships based on Twitter data using two dictionaries of emotional words. Emotion scores are calculated via keyword matching. Moreover, we design three experiments with different settings: calculate the average emotion score of a user with random sampling, calculate the average emotion score using all emotional tweets, and calculate the average emotion score using emotional tweets, excluding users of few emotional tweets. We evaluate the influence of emotional behaviors to user relationships through the Brunner–Munzel test. The result shows that a positive user is more active than a negative user in constructing user relationships in a specific condition.