An Examination of Emotions of Twitter Users in the Boston Bombing Twitterverse

Social Network Services (SNS) such as Twitter play an important role in the way people share their emotions or cognitions regarding specific events. Emotions can be spread via SNS and can spur user's actions. Therefore, managing emotion in SNS is important. In this Research In Progress, we investigate Twitterverse that is associated with event related hazard describing keywords (Explosion, Bomb) and their related emotions in the Boston Bombing context. We compare the results with an exploration of Twitterverse that is not associated with the above hazard describing keywords. A sentiment analysis shows Positive emotion, Discrepancy, Tentativeness, and Certainty had consistent patterns over five days of the Boston Bombing incident. When keywords were excluded, the expressed emotions or cognition were higher than when were keywords included. This paper contributes by examining how emotion and cognition differed across keywords relating to the extreme event.