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Tweets show how location can affect our emotions

Researchers analyzed nearly two million Twitter posts made by people in London and San Francisco, Calif.

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By Alice Clifford via SWNS

Our location can affect our emotions, according to a new study of millions of Tweets.

Researchers analyzed nearly two million Twitter posts made by people in London and San Francisco, finding out what events and places were linked to different emotions.

In both cities, tweets made in train stations, on bridges, and other transportation sites tended to express less joy and more disgust.

Tweets from hotels and restaurants showed higher levels of joy.

Specific events also led to certain emotions.

In San Francisco, users displayed their highest levels of anger, disgust, and sadness on the day of the 2017 Women’s March.

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In London, users showed high levels of fear and sadness during two local terrorism attacks.

While New Year’s Eve in both cities coincided with high levels of joy.

The team used computational tools known as neural networks to study the Tweets made by more than 200,000 people in the two cities.

They analyzed when people expressed anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, or trust.

However, the researchers send caution against overgeneralizing their results. One reason for this is that the study only included Tweets in English.

The team hopes that these results could help pave the way to additional fine-grained research to inform urban planning and tourism.

Study author Panote Siriaraya, from the Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan, added: “Our study highlights how it is possible to portray the characteristics of fine-grained emotions at a detailed spatial and temporal level throughout the whole city, using publicly available data sources.”

The data was published in the journal PLoS ONE.

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