Lost in transmission? Self- and other-annotation of emotional words

Abstract

It is generally assumed that someone's affective state can be correctly detected and interpreted by other people, nowadays even by computer algorithms, in their writing. However, it is unclear whether these perceptions match the actual experience and communicative intention of the author. Therefore, we investigated the relation between affect expression and perception in text in a two-part study. In Part 1, participants (authors) wrote about emotional experiences according to four combinations of two appraisals (High/Low Pleasantness, High/Low Control), rated the valence of each text, and annotated words using 22 emotions. In Part 2, another group of participants (readers) rated and annotated the same texts. We also compare the human evaluations to those provided by computerized text analysis. Results show that valence differed across conditions and that authors rated and annotated their texts differently than readers. Although the automatic analysis detected levels of positivity and negativity across conditions similar to human valence ratings, it relied on fewer and different words to do so. We discuss implications for affective science and automatic sentiment analysis.