PANAS-t: A Psychometric Scale for Measuring Feelings on Twitter

• Pollyanna Gonçalves Federal University of Ouro Preto
• Wellington Dores Federal University of Ouro Preto
• Fabricio Benevenuto Federal University of Ouro Preto

Abstract

Twitter has become an important medium of social communication, where users post messages about everything. Some of these messages express information about the user's emotional state, which can be useful in developing applications that predict the emotive tendencies of a population or simply to better understand the effects of world phenomena or places in people's moods. In this work, we adapted a metric scale known as PANAS-x, commonly applied in questionnaire form, to measure the feelings of Twitter users about a series of social, political and sports events. Our results suggest that PANAS-t, our adapted version of PANAS-x, correctly captures feelings for the analyzed events

Keywords: Sentiment Analysis, Psychometric Scale, Twitter

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