ABSTRACT
In recent years, researchers from fields as diverse as psychology, computer sciences, and communication sciences have increasingly turned to the Internet as a source of data about emotions. For psychology, studying emotions on the Internet is a new and exciting challenge because this medium offers vast amounts of data and greater ecological validity than most laboratory experiments. However, “online emotions” are typically observed only indirectly in some form of textual communication recorded on the Internet, rather than more immediately in the emotional or physiological responses of the human participants of a conversation. While this may be less of a concern from a pure communications perspective, the relationship between the textual content of online communication and the emotional states of people turns into a key issue for the study of psychological processes associated with such emotions.
