Emotion extraction and entrainment in social media: The case of U.S. immigration and border security

Emotion plays an important role in shaping public policy and business decisions. The growth of social media has allowed people to express their emotion publicly in an unprecedented manner. Textual content and user linkages fostered by social media networks can be used to examine emotion types, intensity, and contagion. However, research into how emotion evolves and entrains in social media that influence security issues is scarce. In this research, we developed an approach to analyzing emotion expressed in political social media. We compared two methods of emotion analysis to identify influential users and to trace their contagion effects on public emotion, and report preliminary findings of analyzing the emotion of 105,304 users who posted 189,012 tweets on the U.S. immigration and border security issues in November 2014. The results provide strong implication for understanding social actions and for collecting social intelligence for security informatics. This research should contribute to helping decision makers and security personnel to use public emotion effectively to develop appropriate strategies.