Modeling Seasonality of Emotional Tension in Social Media

Social media has become an almost unlimited resource for studying social processes. Seasonality is a phenomenon that significantly affects many physical and mental states. Modeling collective emotional seasonal changes is a challenging task for the technical, social, and humanities sciences. This is due to the laboriousness and complexity of obtaining a sufficient amount of data, processing and evaluating them, and presenting the results. At the same time, understanding the annual dynamics of collective sentiment provides us with important insights into collective behavior, especially in various crises or disasters. In our study, we propose a scheme for identifying and evaluating signs of the seasonal rise and fall of emotional tension based on social media texts. The analysis is based on Russian-language comments in VKontakte social network communities devoted to city news and the events of a small town in the Nizhny Novgorod region, Russia. Workflow steps include a statistical method for categorizing data, exploratory analysis to identify common patterns, data aggregation for modeling seasonal changes, the identification of typical data properties through clustering, and the formulation and validation of seasonality criteria. As a result of seasonality modeling, it is shown that the calendar seasonal model corresponds to the data, and the dynamics of emotional tension correlate with the seasons. The proposed methodology is useful for a wide range of social practice issues, such as monitoring public opinion or assessing irregular shifts in mass emotions.