Relationship between emotion and diffusion of disaster information on social media: Case study on 2011 Tohoku earthquake

Abstract

In this article, we investigate “retweeting in Twitter” or information transfer behavior in social media to figure out some characteristics of our information processing behavior in emergency situation from social psychological perspective. We made an exploratory log analysis of Twitter focusing on the relationship between diffusion of disaster information and user's emotional response on them. Disaster-related tweets which were retweeted over 10 times around the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake were extracted and emotional words in them were categorized and counted. Frequently retweeted tweets tended to include more negative (anxious or angry) or active emotional words than positive or inactive words. As results of multiple and quantile regression analyses, negative (especially anxious) or active emotional words in tweets had a significant effect on the increase of retweeting regardless of a kind of disasters. The results were discussed in terms of the difference with those based on common tweets.