Psychology News
A team of researchers at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan, provided interesting insights into the emotional landmarks in cities. The study is published in the journal PLOS ONE.
The Study
The researchers used neural networks, a computational tool, to analyze nearly 2 million Tweets (made by more than 200,000 people in London and San Francisco) about the emotional life in cities.
They assessed the link between emotions and city locations as well as events. They surveyed how these factors determined positive and negative emotions in the city folk, including joy, disappointment, trust, anticipation, anger, etc.
The Findings
The results revealed that people associate specific events and types of locations with different emotions. For instance, tweets made from passages of commute and transportation sites like train stations and bridges express less joy and more disgust. Those made in restaurants and hotels show higher scores of happiness.
Similarly, tweets made about events associated with terror attacks or political rallies show charged negative emotions. Contrarily, seasonal events like New Year’s Eve coincide with high levels of joy.
The authors added: “Our study highlights how it is possible to portray the characteristics of fine-grained emotions at a detailed spatial and temporal level throughout the whole city, using publicly available data sources [about emotional landmarks in cities].”
To Know More You May Refer To
Siriaraya, P., Zhang, Y., Kawai, Y., Jeszenszky, P., & Jatowt, A. (2023). A city-wide examination of fine-grained human emotions through social media analysis. PloS one, 18(2), e0279749. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279749