Data Mining Reveals the Emotional Differences In Emails From Men and Women 100
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."
What the F$&*? Talk about a big fat fallacy! (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course men and women use different language in their emails. Young men would use different language than middle aged or older people do. A person emailing a friend would have different language than when they email their boss. This is not indicative of there "emotions". This is indicative of their education, wisdom, and who they are having a conversation with and the topics of discussion.
This whole article discusses work done on an absolutely false premise. Emails can not be used to determine your emotional state, any more than tweets can not be used to determine your psychological state.
Pack it in you eugenics morons! We are on to your game!
"fear" words et al (Score:3, Interesting)
Even the journal article linked to by the blog seems to be scant on details. I was hoping there'd at least be a few appendices on these things, but no such luck. Anyone know exactly what "joy words," "fear words," et al are?
Thanks in advance.