Between conjecture and memento: shaping a collective emotional perception of the future

TL;DR

This paper explores how analyzing large-scale online content like emails can reveal public emotional perceptions of the future, showing overall optimism but medium-term concerns.

Contribution

It introduces a method to assess public mood towards the future using content analysis of emails, extending the Profile of Mood States questionnaire.

Findings

Long-term optimism about the future.

Medium-term apprehension and confusion.

Effective use of email data for mood analysis.

Abstract

Large scale surveys of public mood are costly and often impractical to perform. However, the web is awash with material indicative of public mood such as blogs, emails, and web queries. Inexpensive content analysis on such extensive corpora can be used to assess public mood fluctuations. The work presented here is concerned with the analysis of the public mood towards the future. Using an extension of the Profile of Mood States questionnaire, we have extracted mood indicators from 10,741 emails submitted in 2006 to futureme.org, a web service that allows its users to send themselves emails to be delivered at a later date. Our results indicate long-term optimism toward the future, but medium-term apprehension and confusion.