MEASURING SENTIMENTS ON TWITTER BY MEANS OF A PSYCHOMETRIC SCALE

Abstract

Twitter has become an important social communication mean where users post messages about everything. Certain messages express information about their author's emotional state, which may be useful in developing applications that predict emotional trends of a population or simply to better understand the effects of global and local phenomena in the mood of people. In this study, we adapted a psychometric scale known as the PANAS-X, commonly applied as a questionnaire, to measure the feelings of Twitter users in many social, political and sporting events. Our results suggest that the PANAS-t, our adapted version of the PANAS-X, correctly captures feelings for the events analyzed.