skip to main content
research-article

Emotional Amplification During Live-Streaming: Evidence from Comments During and After News Events

Published:29 May 2020Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

Live streaming services allow people to concurrently consume and comment on media events with other people in real time. Durkheim's theory of "collective effervescence" suggests that face-to-face encounters in ritual events conjure emotional arousal, so people often feel happier and more excited while watching events like the Super Bowl with family and friends through the television than if they were alone. Does a stronger emotional intensity also occur in live streaming? Using a large-scale dataset of comments posted to news and media events on YouTube, we address this question by examining emotional intensity in live comments versus those produced retrospectively. Results reveal that live comments are overall more emotionally intense than retrospective comments across all temporal periods and all event types examined. Findings support the emotional amplification hypothesis and provide preliminary evidence for shared attention theory in explaining the amplification effect. These findings have important implications for live streaming platforms to optimize resources for content moderation and to improve psychological well-being for content moderators, and more broadly as society grapples with using technology to stay connected during social distancing required by the COVID-19 pandemic.

References

  1. Raquel Alvarez, David Garcia, Yamir Moreno, and Frank Schweitzer. 2015. Sentiment cascades in the 15M movement. EPJ Data Science(2015). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-015-0042--4Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. Erica J. Boothby, Margaret S. Clark, and John A. Bargh. 2014. Shared experiences are amplified. Psychological Science 12, Article 25 (2014), 2209--2216 pages. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614551162Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. Justin Cheng, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Anyone can become a troll: Causes of trolling behavior in online discussions. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '17)(2017), 1217--1230. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998213Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. Robert B. Cialdini, Richard J. Thorne Borden, Avril Walker, Marcus Randall Freeman, Stephen Sloan, and Lloyd Reynolds. 1976. Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology(1976). https://doi.org/10.1037/0022--3514.34.3.366Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp, and Friedrich Krotz. 2009. Media events in a global age. Routledge(2009).Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  6. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Robert Kubey. 1981. Television and the rest of life: A systematic comparison of subjective experience. Public Opinion Quarterly45 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1086/268667Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. Xi Cui, Jian Rui, and Fanbo Su. 2016. From immediate community to imagined community: Social identity and the co-viewing of media event. Global Media and China 4, Article 1 (2016), 481--496 pages. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059436416681177Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. Ed Diener and Robert A. Emmons. 1984. The independence of positive and negative affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 47, Article 5 (1984), 1105--1117 pages. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022--3514.47.5.1105Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  9. Emile Durkheim. 1912.The elementary forms of the religious life.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. Nicole Enberg. 2012. YouTube Launches New.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. Travis Faas, Lynn Dombrowski, Alyson Young, and Andrew D. Miller. 2018. Watch Me Code: Programming Mentorship Communities on Twitch.tv. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction(2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3274319Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  12. Russell H. Fazio. 1995. Attitudes as object-evaluation associations: Determinants, consequences, and correlates of attitude accessibility.In Attitude Strength: Antecedents and Consequences, Article 4 (1995), 247--282 pages.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  13. David Garcia, Arvid Kappas, Dennis Kuster, and Frank Schweitzer. 2016. The dynamics of emotions in online interaction. Royal Society Open Science(2016). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160059Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  14. David Garcia and Bernard Rime. 2019. Collective Emotions and Social Resilience in the Digital Traces After a Terrorist Attack. Psychological Science(2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619831964Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  15. Tarleton Gillespie. 2018. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions ThatShape Social Media.Yale University Press(2018).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. Amit Goldenberg, David Garcia, Eran Halperin, and James J. Gross. in press. Collective Emotions. Current Directions in Psychological Science(in press).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. Amit Goldenberg, Saguy Tamar, and Eran Halperin. 2014. How group-based emotions are shaped by collective emotions: Evidence for emotional transfer and emotional burden. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology(2014). https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037462Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  18. Oliver L. Haimson and John C. Tang. 2017. What makes live events engaging on Facebook live, periscope, and snapchat. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). 48--60. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025642Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  19. Eran Halperin. 2014. Collective emotions and emotion regulation in intractable conflicts. Collective emotions(2014).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  20. William A. Hamilton, Oliver Garretson, and Andruid Kerne. 2014. Streaming on twitch: Fostering participatory communities of play within live mixed media. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI(2014). https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557048Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  21. Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson. 1993. Emotional contagion. Current directions in psychological science(1993).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  22. Bryce Huebner. 2011. Genuinely collective emotions. European Journal for Philosophy of Science(2011).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. C. J. Hutto and Eric Gilbert. 2014. VADER: A parsimonious rule-based model for sentiment analysis of social media text. In Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM14/paper/view/8109Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  24. Reuters Institute. 2018. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018. Retrieved January 30, 2020 from https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/digital-news-report-2018.pdfGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  25. E. Jolly, D. I. Tamir, B. Burum, and J. P. Mitchell. 2019. Wanting without enjoying: The social value of sharing experiences. PloS one 4, Article 14 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0215318Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  26. Oskar Juhlin, Arvid Engstrom, and Erika Reponen. 2010. Mobile broadcasting: the whats and hows of live video as asocial medium. In Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices and services - MobileHCI '10. https://doi.org/10.1145/1851600.1851610Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  27. Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes. 2007. "No More Peace!": How Disaster, Terror and War Have Upstaged Media Events.International Journal of Communication(2007).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  28. Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. 2014. Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences24, Article 111 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320040111Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  29. Nour S. Kteily, Matthew D. Rocklage, Kaylene McClanahan, and Arnold K. Ho. 2019. Political ideology shapes the amplification of the accomplishments of disadvantaged vs. advantaged group members. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences5, Article 116 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1818545116Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  30. Zhicong Lu, Michelle Annett, Mingming Fan, and Daniel Wigdor. 2019. "I feel it is my responsibility to stream": Streaming and engaging with intangible cultural heritage through live streaming. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI(2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300459Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  31. Zichong Lu, Haijun Xia, Seongkook Heo, and Daniel Wigdor. 2018. You watch, you give, and you engage: A study of live streaming practices in china. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI(2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174040Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  32. Danae Metaxa, Joon Sung Park, James A. Landay, and Jeff Hancock. 2019. Search Media and Elections: A Longitudinal Investigation of Political Search Results in the 2018 U.S. Elections.In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '19)(2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3359231Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  33. James W. Pennebaker. 2011. The secret life of pronouns.New Scientist211 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0262--4079(11)62167--2Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  34. James W. Pennebaker, Matthias R. Mehl, and Kate G. Niederhoffer. 2003. Psychological aspects of natural language use:Our words, our selves.Annual Review of Psychology54, Article 1 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145041Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  35. Paul Rayson. 2008. From key words to key semantic domains. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13, Article 4(2008), 30 pages. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.13.4.06rayGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  36. Paul Rayson, Damon Berridge, and Brian Francis. 2004. Extending the Cochran rule for the comparison of word frequencies between corpora. 7th International Conference on Statistical analysis of textual data (JADT 2004)(2004).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  37. Sarah T. Roberts. 2019. Behind the screen: Content moderation in the shadows of social media. Yale University Press(2019).Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  38. Matthew D. Rocklage and Russell H. Fazio. 2015. The Evaluative Lexicon: Adjective use as a means of assessing and distinguishing attitude valence, extremity, and emotionality.Journal of Experimental Social Psychology56 (2015), 13.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2014.10.005Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  39. Matthew D. Rocklage and Derek D. Rucker. 2018. Text Analysis in consumer research: An overview and tutorial. The handbook of research methods in consumer psychology(2018). http://www.evaluativelexicon.com/papers/TextAnalysis_Handbook.pdfGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  40. Matthew D. Rocklage, Derek D. Rucker, and Loran F. Nordgren. 2018. The Evaluative Lexicon 2.0: The measurement ofemotionality, extremity, and valence in language. Behavior Research Methods50, Article 4 (2018), 17 pages. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-017-0975--6Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  41. James A. Russell. 1980. A circumplex model of affect.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology(1980). https://doi.org/10.1037/h0077714Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  42. Joseph Seering, Robert Kraut, and Laura Dabbish. 2017. Shaping pro and anti-social behavior on twitch through moderation and example-setting. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing - CSCW(2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998277Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  43. Garriy Shteynberg. 2015. Shared Attention. Perspectives on Psychological Science(2015). https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615589104Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  44. Garriy Shteynberg. 2018. A collective perspective: shared attention and the mind. Current Opinion in Psychology 23(2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.12.007Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  45. Garriy Shteynberg, Jacob B. Hirsh, Evan P. Apfelbaum, Jeff T. Larsen, Adam D. Galinsky, and Neal J. Roese. 2014. Feeling more together: Group attention intensifies emotion.Emotion14, Article 6 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037697Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  46. Garriy Shteynberg, Jacob B. Hirsh, Adam D. Galinsky, and Andrew P. Knight. 2014. Shared attention increases mood infusion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General143, Article 1 (2014), 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031549Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  47. Rachel A. Simmons, Peter C. Gordon, and Dianne L. Chambless. 2005. Pronouns in marital interaction: What do "you" and "I" say about marital health?Psychological Science16, Article 12 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467--9280.2005.01639.xGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  48. C. R. Snyder, Mary Lassegard, and Carol E. Anne Ford. 1986. Distancing after group success and failure: Basking in reflected glory and cutting off reflected failure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology(1986).https://doi.org/10.1037/0022--3514.51.2.382Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  49. Cansu Sogut, Frederic F. Brunel, and Barbara A. Bickart. 2015. Now or later: Synchrony effects on electronic word-of-mouth content. Social Science Research Network(2015). https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2549227Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  50. John C. Tang, Gina Venolia, and Kori M. Inkpen. 2010. Meerkat and periscope: I stream, you stream, apps stream for live streams. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). https://doi.org/10.1145/1851600.1851610Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  51. Yla R. Tausczik and James W. Pennebaker. 2010. The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology29, Article 1 (2010).https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X09351676Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  52. Cristian Vaccari, Andrew Chadwick, and Ben O'Loughlin. 2015. Dual screening the political: media events, social media, and citizen engagement. Journal of Communication65, Article 6 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12187Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  53. Christian von Scheve and Sven Ismer. 2013. Towards a theory of collective emotions.Emotion Review(2013).https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073913484170Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  54. Christian von Scheve and Mikko Salmella. 2014. Collective Emotions: Perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Oxford University Press(2014).Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  55. Donghee Yvette Wohn. 2019. Volunteer moderators in twitch micro communities: How they get involved, the rolesthey play, and the emotional labor they experience. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI(2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300390Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  56. Monika Wrobel and Kamil K. Imbir. 2019. Broadening the perspective on emotional contagion and emotional mimicry: The correction hypothesis. Perspectives on Psychological Science 14, Article 3 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618808523Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  57. Achim Zeileis, Christian Kleiber, and Simon Jackman. 2008. Regression models for count data in R. Journal of Statistical Software 27 (2008). https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v027.i08Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

Index Terms

  1. Emotional Amplification During Live-Streaming: Evidence from Comments During and After News Events

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in

    Full Access

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader
    About Cookies On This Site

    We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

    Learn more

    Got it!