Positive vs. Negative emotions and network size: An exploratory study of twitter users

This chapter looks at the relationship between the expression of positive and negative emotions in Twitter and users’ network size. The questions that guided this study are : Do users who tweet twice or more “I am bored,” “I am excited,” “I feel lonely,” “I feel loved,” “I feel sad,” and “I feel happy” gain more followers and friends or lose them? Do users who express positive emotions twice or more have more followers and friends compared to users who express negative emotions or less? Do users who express boredom, excitement, loneliness, feeling loved, sadness, and happiness twice or more interact more with their networks or less? To address these questions,the study collected 35,096 English tweets in 2016. The findings indicate that users who tweeted these emotions, their number of followers and number of friends have increased, not decreased and that only users who expressed excitement had more followers and friends than users who expressed boredom. The study contributes to the literature on the benefits that lonely, sad, and bored users can reap from expressing emotions in Twitter.