February 2012

2011 was an interesting year for many and obvious reasons. Well, this is my opinion. However, a year is perceived very differently by individuals and therefore, the mean tendencies in the population are of interest.

In this direction ‒ extracting emotional tendencies from the general population ‒, I have analysed Twitter content geolocated in the UK and have extracted affective (mood) scores using an approach which is presented in my Ph.D. Thesis. Four emotions have been considered, namely anger, fear, sadness and joy. In the attached plot, the scores of anger, fear and sadness have been merged and joy's scores have been subtracted from them. Red line is the exact extracted signal, whereas the black line is its smoothed version (using a 7-point moving average to derive a weekly tendency).