User emotion analysis in conflicting versus non-conflicting regions using online social networks

Abstract

Society plays a vital role in maintaining the emotional health of an individual. People living in conflicting zones are emotionally degraded and often hold more negativity than the people living in serene areas. Nowadays, analyzing the emotions shared on social networking websites is an ongoing topic of research. In this paper, we presented the potential of user data available on the Facebook website in distinguishing the emotions of netizens in conflicting versus non-conflicting areas. We collected the Facebook posts of the users living in Kashmir (conflicting region) and Delhi (non-conflicting) with the help of two source accounts. Plutchik's eight basic emotions, namely, fear, anger, sadness, joy, surprise, disgust, trust and anticipation have been used to determine the emotion state of a user. Based on two well-known lexicons, namely, EmoLex and Empath, a new dictionary called MoodBook is designed to determine the user emotions from their posts. After analyzing the data, we found that violence in the conflicting region has badly affected the psychology of the citizens as most of the people in Kashmir fall under three negative emotion categories, namely, fear, anger, and sadness, whereas the joy mood has been found more in the posts of Delhi-based users. Furthermore, a mood-vector is created for each user and used as an input to k-means clustering where it has been found that the citizens of two regions form separate groups based on their psychological state. The study of the difference between emotions expressed online by the citizens of conflicting and non-conflicting has not been seen in the literature till date.