Personality and emotion—A comprehensive analysis using contextual text embeddings

Abstract

Personality and emotions have always been closely intertwined since humans evolved, adapting to these two forms. Emotions are indicative of a person’s personality, and vice versa. This paper aims to investigate the complex relationship between these two fundamental aspects of human behavior using the concepts of machine learning and statistical analysis. The objective is to automate the process of determining the relationship between personality traits of the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) and Ekman’s emotions based on the context of user-written social media posts using contextual embedding. A robust mechanism is employed, involving two main phases to figure out emotions from the social media posts. The first phase involves determining the cosine similarity scores between each MBTI personality trait and predefined emotions. The second phase introduces a cross-dataset learning approach where several machine learning models are trained on a dataset labeled with emotions to learn patterns of emotions found in the text. After training, these models utilize the patterns they learned to predict emotions in a targeted dataset. With an overall accuracy of 85.23%, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) is chosen as the most effective and high-performing model for emotion prediction tasks. We employed a vetting mechanism combining two approaches to improve accuracy, reliability, and trustworthiness for the final emotion prediction. Finally, using statistical quantification, this paper finds patterns that link each MBTI personality trait with Ekman emotions. It reveals that extroverts (E), sensing (S), and feeling (F) personality types are more likely to share joyful and surprising emotional posts, while individuals with extroversion (E), intuition (N), thinking (T), and perception (P) traits tend to express negative emotions such as anger and disgust. Conversely, introverts (I), intuitive (N), thinking (T), and judging (J) personalities are more inclined to share posts reflecting fear and sadness. This comprehensive study provides valuable insights on how individuals with different personality types typically express emotions on social media.