Data Mining Reveals the Emotional Differences In Emails From Men and Women

KentuckyFC writes "Sentiment analysis relies on vast databases of common words which are marked as positive, negative or neutral and associated with one of the eight fundamental emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, discuss, anger and anticipation. It is then a straightforward matter to search Tweets, novels and even fairy tales to see what emotions appear. Now, researchers have carried out the first large-scale study of sentiment in workplace emails. They examined the emotions associated with words in over 30,000 emails and analyzed the emotional differences between messages sent by men and women. It turns out that women use more cheerful words in emails than men, that men use more fear words, especially when communicating with other men, and that both men and women are far more likely to use anticipation words when emailing a member of the opposite sex. The same researchers say they are developing a Google app that will allow users to track their own emotions towards the people they correspond with in Gmail. And they plan to make a public call for volunteers willing to share their data for research purposes."

Re:"fear" words et al

[waddleman]

From the research paper:

The lexicon has entries for about 24,200 word–sense pairs. The information from different senses of a word is combined by taking the union of all emotions associated with the different senses of the word. This resulted in a word-level emotion association lexicon for about 14,200 word types. These files are together referred to as the NRC Emotion Lexicon version 0.92.