Fear and loathing in Boston: The roles of different emotions in information sharing on social media following a terror attack

Emotions are essential to how we communicate, and online discussions are no exception. As most of the analysis on emotion so far has looked at polarity rather than specific emotions, we do not yet have a full understanding of how different emotions spark different behaviours. This study examines how five different emotions are associated with information sharing in the context of a terror attack both on a large scale and when including geolocation information in the analysis. Contrary to what previous findings suggest, increased fear and contempt levels have a negative relation with increased levels of retweeting. Positive emotion in tweets meant a decrease in retweet rates in the geolocation specific data, but an increase when all tweets were considered.