Collective emotions online and their influence on community life
Anna Chmiel, Julian Sienkiewicz, Mike Thelwall, Georgios Paltoglou,, Kevan Buckley, Arvid Kappas, Janusz A. Ho{\l}yst

TL;DR
This study analyzes large-scale online community data to demonstrate that collective emotions influence community dynamics and can be systematically created and modulated through Internet interactions.
Contribution
It provides empirical evidence that collective emotions in online communities are influenced by intra-group interactions and can significantly affect community activity patterns.
Findings
Long emotional clusters occur more frequently than random chance predicts.
Community discussions with higher initial emotional valence tend to last longer.
Emotional expressiveness sustains and modulates online community engagement.
Abstract
E-communities, social groups interacting online, have recently become an object of interdisciplinary research. As with face-to-face meetings, Internet exchanges may not only include factual information but also emotional information - how participants feel about the subject discussed or other group members. Emotions are known to be important in affecting interaction partners in offline communication in many ways. Could emotions in Internet exchanges affect others and systematically influence quantitative and qualitative aspects of the trajectory of e-communities? The development of automatic sentiment analysis has made large scale emotion detection and analysis possible using text messages collected from the web. It is not clear if emotions in e-communities primarily derive from individual group members' personalities or if they result from intra-group interactions, and whether they…
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