Emotional Contagion Through Online Newspapers

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Reference

Boesch, K., Mueller,Oliver, & Schneider, J. (2018). Emotional Contagion Through Online Newspapers. Paper presented at the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). (VHB_3: B)

Publication type

Paper in Conference Proceedings

Abstract

Emotions spread through online and offline social networks and subsequently influence individuals' decisions and behaviours. Empirical studies on emotional contagion are almost non-existent in information systems research, leaving a gap in understanding how individuals are affected by emotions expressed in online sources. Online newspaper articles and the associated readers' comments provide a rich and mostly unfiltered data source that is utilized in this work to identify emotional contagion effects between newspaper publishers and its readers. By applying lexicon-based sentiment analysis and multi-level linear regression models to 1,151 online newspaper articles and 28,948 associated readers' comments , we model the relationships between sentiments in newspaper articles and comments. The results provide empirical support for emotional contagion effects between emotions expressed in online newspaper articles and emotions expressed in readers' comments. Linguistic, psychological and methodo-logical limitations are considered and discussed.

Persons

Organizational Units

  • Institute of Information Systems
  • Hilti Chair of Business Process Management

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