Emotion Interaction in Cities

Abstract

Emotional states are social and highly influenced by city attributes. Population, for example, has a direct impact on parameters such as connections, communication, and social interaction based on urban scaling laws. It is likely that population also influences emotional experiences, as emotions are regulated by social activity. To analyze emotional states in social interaction, that is, emotion interaction, urban scaling properties are applied to the Twitter activity and emotion interactions of major cities in the USA and UK. To our knowledge, emotion interaction has yet to be explored through urban scaling laws. Furthermore, the world is facing the COVID-19 pandemic, which has severely affected the physical and emotional well-being of humans. This study compares emotion interaction during COVID-19 and before it started to analyze the impact of population on deviating emotional states. The findings suggest that emotion interaction follows superlinear scaling, i.e., there is an increase in emotion interaction with an increase in population. However, negative emotion interaction tends to increase more in response to population. The statistics on emotional interaction in cities reflect cognitive experiences of cities as well as an understanding of human behavior in expanding urban environments, which can be useful in defining the narratives of cities and developing citizen-centric sustainable and resilient city plans.