People are more likely to express disgust and frustration on social media when they’re at a train station, new research suggests.
Other traffic areas, such as bridges and bus stops, are also common places people post, researchers said after analyzing nearly 2 million tweets from London and San Francisco.
A team from Kyoto Institute of Technology (KIT) in Japan Information about specific buildings and other locations obtained from Open Street Map, a free public geographic database, was also used.
Combining these tweets, they were able to determine when and where people expressed a range of emotions, from anticipation and disgust to surprise and delight.
According to the study, while the city’s transportation network appeared to be the main cause of depression, tweets from hotels and restaurants showed higher levels of happiness.
Certain events were also linked to people’s moods—for example, New Year’s Eve coincided with greater excitement and happiness in London and San Francisco.
However, on the day of the Women’s March in 2017, Protests after Donald Trump became presidentIndicative of greatly increased levels of anger, disgust, and sadness in San Francisco.
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The researchers caution against overgeneralizing the findings because it only considered tweets in English, however, they believe this kind of data could inform industries such as urban planning and tourism.
“Our study highlights how fine-grained sentiment can be characterized at a detailed spatial and temporal level across cities using publicly available data sources,” said KIT’s Panote Siriaraya.
The peer-reviewed findings have been published in the journal PLOS ONE.