Bryson: “Measuring cultural relativity of emotional valence and arousal using semantic clustering and twitter

Researchers since at least Darwin have debated whether and to what extent emotions are universal or culture-dependent. How-ever, previous studies have primarily focused on facial expres-sions and on a limited set of emotions. Given that emotions have a substantial impact on human lives, evidence for cul-tural emotional relativity might be derived by applying distri-butional semantics techniques to a text corpus of self-reported behaviour. Here, we explore this idea by measuring the valence and arousal of the twelve most popular emotion keywords ex-pressed on the micro-blogging site Twitter. We do this in three geographical regions: Europe, Asia and North America. We demonstrate that in our sample, the valence and arousal lev-els of the same emotion keywords differ significantly with re-spect to these geographical regions — Europeans are, or at least present themselves as more positive and aroused, North Americans are more negative and Asians appear to be more positive but less aroused when compared to global valence and arousal levels of the same emotion keywords. Our work is the first in kind to programatically map large text corpora to a di-mensional model of affect