Tag Archives: emotions

Sociologists tracking “global mood swings” through Twitter

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New social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are ripe data sources. A new study in Science done by two sociologists examines the world’s emotions through Twitter:

The research team, led by Scott Golder, a PhD doctoral student in the field of sociology, and Professor of Sociology Michael Macy, tracked 2.4 million people in 84 different countries over the past two years. Clearly the team working on the project didn’t read through 2.4 million people’s tweets. Instead, they used a text analysis program that quantified the emotional content of 509 million tweets. Their results, featured in the paper “Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Tracks Work, Sleep and Day Length Across Diverse Cultures,” were published September 29 in Science.

The researchers found that work, sleep, and the amount of daylight we get really does affect things like our enthusiasm, delight, alertness, distress, fear, and anger. They concluded that people tweet more positive things early in the morning and then again around midnight. This could suggest that people aren’t very happy while they’re working since their happy tweets are at the beginning and end of the day. Saturday and Sunday also saw more positive tweets in general. The weekend showed these peaks at about 2 hours later, which accounts for sleeping in and staying out late.

Of course, all of the trends weren’t the same throughout every country. For example, the United Arab Emirates tend to work Sunday through Thursday, so their weekend tweets happened on Friday and Saturdays. The results also found that people who live in countries that get more daylight (closer to the equator) aren’t necessarily happier than people in countries that get less daylight (closer to the North and South Poles). It seems that only people who have a lot of daylight during the summer and then very little in the winter feel the affect of the change in seasons as much.

Clearly the results of the research aren’t perfect. There may be some people who only share positive things on Twitter, or some people who love to be cynical and use Twitter to complain about problems.

This sounds interesting and the resulting maps and charts are intriguing.  However, I would first ask methodological questions that would get at whether this is worthwhile data or not. Does this really reflect global moods? Or does this simply tell us something about Twitter users, who are likely not representative of the population at large?

Another article does suggest this study makes methodological improvements over two common ways studies look at emotions:

None of these results are particularly surprising, but Golder and Macy suggest that using global tweets allows them to confirm previous studies that only looked at small samples of American undergraduates who were not necessarily representative of the wider world. Traditional studies also require participants to recall their past emotions, whereas tweets can be gathered in real time.

These are good things: more immediate data and a wider sample beyond college undergraduates. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Twitter data is good data. The sample still probably skews toward younger people and those who have the technological means to be on Twitter consistently. Additionally, immediate emotions can tell us one thing but inquiring about longer-term satisfaction often tells us something else.

On the whole, this sounds like better data than we have before but until we have more universal Twitter usage, this data source will have significant limitations.

How sociology can “unravel the [London] riots”

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The president and vice-chair of the British Sociological Association explain how sociology can help explain the London riots:

One of the first things that disappears when considering disturbances such as these is perspective. One loses sight of the fact that nine out of 10 local residents aren’t rioting, that nine out of 10 who are rioting aren’t local to the area, and that nine out of 10 of these non-locals aren’t doing it to commit crime. That is to say, it is a tiny minority who are participating and, of those that are, it’s a tiny minority who are doing so solely to commit crime. Crime is a motive, but crowd behaviour is a more complex process, and it is sociology as a discipline that best understands crowd behaviour.

Crowds are irrational. Crowds don’t have motives – that’s far too calculating and rational. Crowd behaviour is dynamic in unpredictable ways, and reason and motive disappear when crowds move unpredictably. But has anyone made a connection with the two media events that dominated media coverage on the same day – the irrationality of crowds on the streets and of traders on the stock market? Both sorts of behaviour are moved by emotion not reason, passions not predictability, and reason disappears. Economists are lauded for their accounts of the irrationality of the market traders, but sociologists get criticised for suggesting that allegations of criminality are a poor account of the irrationality of crowds.

Sociologists seek to explain – not explain away – these events. An understanding of the impact of social inequalities and deprivation, youth unemployment, racism and ethnic conflict, and crime and policing forms a large part of the concerns of UK sociology. Since most politicians and the police seem to have been taken unawares by the events of the past few days, it seems we need more understanding and explanation, not less, if we are to be able to draw lessons from the current events and prevent their recurrence. The British Sociological Association would be happy to put London’s mayor and his staff in touch with sociologists who could add real understanding to the all-too-easy condemnations of these disturbing events.

Several things stand out to me:
1. I like the opening suggestion and make a similar argument to my Introduction to Sociology class: instead of asking why a few people commit crimes or are deviant, why not ask why most people are so willing to follow social rules and norms?

2. I like the comparison of the role of emotions in stock trading and crowd behavior on the streets. Arguably, emotions may a large role in social actions but generally get short shrift from commentators and researchers.

3. But, why suggest that sociologists are bitter because economists “are lauded” for their explanations?

4. I like the distinction between explaining and explaining away. I’ve seen some commentators suggest that we shouldn’t talk about the class status or alienation of the rioters because this may suggest that their actions are justified. But, at the same time, there is something that set off these riots and sociologists are often looking to understanding why something happened and not something else (to paraphrase Weber). We should not be afraid of explanations though determining how one should respond once the explanation is known is another matter.

Negative emotions in the workplace

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A recent Time magazine piece discusses the role, or lack of a role, of negative emotions in the workplace:

In the binary shorthand we use to compartmentalize modern life, we think of home as the realm of emotion and work as the place where rationality rules — a tidy distinction that crumbles in the face of experience. As management scholar Blake Ashforth has written, it is a “convenient fiction that organizations are cool arenas for dispassionate thought and action.” In fact, in the workplace we are bombarded by emotions — our own and everyone else’s. Neuroscientists have demonstrated over and over in empirical ways just how integral emotion is in all aspects of our lives, including our work. But since companies have generally avoided the subject, there are no clear protocols about emotional expression in the office.

The only instance in which we acknowledge emotion is when doing so is seen as obviously beneficial, both personally and professionally…

But we’re still largely clueless about how to display and react to more commonplace emotions such as anger, fear and anxiety, so we handicap ourselves, trying to check our human side at the office door.

As the last paragraph of the article suggests, not being able to express these emotions leaves employees as less than human. It is one thing to be able to act professional or courteous in the workplace but another to suggest that people have to bottle emotions that we all have from time to time. In high stress environments where the personal identity of employees is often closely tied to job performance, negative emotions are bound to come up.

This reminds me of Arlie Hochschild’s concept of “emotion work.” While there are certain professions that require a public performance of cheerfulness (such as a flight attendant or waitress), this article suggests that most employees have to do some form of this. Just as Hochschild suggests, this is also a gendered issue: women are judged differently when expressing emotion.

So how could companies allow employees to express these emotions in positive ways?

Sociologist suggests Twitter offers more immediacy than broadcast news on war

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A sociologist challenges the idea that Twitter is a space for “slacktivists” by arguing that it offers space for emotions and humanity in a way that traditional broadcast news does not.

Quick Review: 21 by Adele

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Even though I listen to a good amount of music, it is still somewhat rare to find an album that really captures my attention. The latest new album to achieve this status is 21, is the recently-released album from British songstress Adele (Adkins). The album has been on the Billboard charts for three weeks since its release, peaked at #1 and now sits at #2 in the Billboard 200. A few thoughts about this album which I have been listening to non-stop for a week:

1. The overall theme of the album is heartbreak – but it sounds like a soulful, engaging sort of heartbreak, the kind you actually might want to hear about over and over again.

2. I particularly enjoy several of the songs. The two songs to open the album are quite good and will make good radio singles. But two songs in the second half of the album are also quite good: Track 7, Take It All, and Track 9, One and Only. Track 7 is just Adele and a piano. Track 9 adds some other instruments but still is just Adele and her feelings.

3.  The arrangements on these songs, similar to the first album, are set up to showcase Adele’s voice. Even when she deviates from the melody, it doesn’t sound like she is preening or showing off.

4. Speaking of the songs, I read a review (or a couple) that mentioned how a lot of the songs sounds alike. I can kind of see the point: once you get past the first two songs, the rest mine similar lyrical ground and primarily feature Adele. This is not an album that has a lot of twists or turns with multiple styles of music or words. My thoughts on this are that the album doesn’t deviate from what Adele does well. To get something different, we’ll have to wait until the next album.

5. One thing I like about the the whole album is that it is unified and does seem to fit the title, a reference to Adele’s age when much of this was put together. This is exactly the age in which you would expect to hear about these upfront and raw emotions. I hope Adele can continue this age-related trend on future albums; this would give us a sort of lifecourse approach. While I think many musicians do this (check out how the themes and styles change as musical artists age and are no longer the young stars they once were), Adele’s first two albums have been more explicit about this. So can the next album, presumably something like 23 or 24,  examine the quarter-life crisis?

(According to Metacritic.com, this album gets “generally favorable reviews” with a composite score of 76 out of 100 based on the thoughts of 29 critics.)

(A side note: I believe the next music album I will review is Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs. While I have heard a lot about this band in recent years, I bought this album, the first one I have purchased, on the same day I bought the Adele album. There are two reasons I want to listen to and review this particular album: the band gets good reviews and the subject matter, suburban life, is right up my alley. As far as I know, there are not too many rock albums that explicitly address the suburbs.)

Using Twitter as a data source; examining emotions and more

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In April, the Library of Congress announced plans to archive all public tweets since the start of Twitter in March 2006. So what might researchers do with this data?

A recent study provides an example. Scholars from Northeastern and Harvard examined the emotions of Americans through their Tweets. By coding certain words as having positive or negative emotional value, researchers were able to map out data. According to New Scientist:

[T]hese “tweets” suggest that the west coast is happier than the east coast, and across the country happiness peaks each Sunday morning, with a trough on Thursday evenings.

The mood map is cool.

While the findings about when people are happy may not be too surprising, the research does bring up the question about the value of Tweets as a data source. Since it is likely skewed to a younger sample and also perhaps a wealthier and more educated group, it is not representative data. But it could provide some insights into reactions to certain events or for seeing the beginning and end of certain trends.

So what else will researchers study using tweets?