Predicting Facebook sentiments towards research

Shahzad, Murtuza; Freeman, Cole; Rahimi, Mona; Alhoori, Hamed

doi:10.1016/j.nlp.2023.100010

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 30 publications

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“…It is considered a newly explored emotion in the emotional literature and has been found to conflate with happiness [ 66 ]. These emotions are selected for two main reasons: (a) they are recognized in the literature as fundamental to human experience, indicating their universal relevance and applicability across different settings [ 67 , 68 ], and (b) they correspond to the emoticons actively used by individuals on social media (especially Facebook) to express their reactions to the content [ 69 , 70 ]. This correspondence makes them particularly relevant for analyzing how individuals process and react to social media news headlines.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Media News Headlines and Their Influence on Well-Being: Emotional States, Emotion Regulation, and Resilience

Mousoulidou,

Taxitari,

Christodoulou

2024

EJIHPE

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Today, many individuals read the daily news from social media platforms. Research has shown that news with negative valence might influence the well-being of individuals. Existing research that examined the impact of headlines on individuals’ well-being has primarily focused on examining the positive or negative polarity of words used in the headlines. In the present study, we adopt a different approach and ask participants to categorize the headlines themselves based on the emotions they experienced while reading them and how their choice impacts their well-being. A total of 306 participants were presented with 40 headlines from main news sites that were considered popular based on the number of public reactions. Participants had to rate their emotional experience of the headlines following five emotional states (i.e., happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and interest). Emotion regulation strategies and resilience were also measured. In line with our hypotheses, we found that participants reported experiencing negative emotions more intensively while reading the headlines. Emotion regulation was not found to influence the emotional states of individuals, whereas resilience did. These findings highlight that individuals can experience heightened emotions without reading the entire news story. This effect was observed regardless of the headline’s emotional valence (i.e., positive, negative, or neutral). Furthermore, our study highlights the critical role of interest as a factor in news consumption. Interest significantly affects individuals’ engagement and reactions to headlines, regardless of valence. The findings underscore the complex interplay between headline content and reader engagement and stress the need for further research into how headlines are presented to protect individuals from potential emotional costs.

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