The Effect of Sentiment on Information Diffusion in Social Media

Social media have facilitated information sharing in social networks. Previous research shows that sentiment of text influences its diffusion in social media. Each emotion can be located on a three-dimensional space formed by dimensions of valence (positive–negative), arousal (passive/calm–active/excited), and tension (tense–relaxed). While previous research has investigated the effect of emotional valence on information diffusion in social media, the effect of emotional arousal remains unexplored. This study examines how emotional arousal influences information diffusion in social media using a sentiment mining approach. We propose a research model and provide directions for testing it using data collected from Twitter