People are more likely to express disgust and frustration on social media when they are at train stations, new research suggests.
Other transportation areas, such as bridges and bus stops, are also common locations for people to rage post, according to the researchers who analysed nearly two million tweets from people in London and San Francisco.
The team from the Kyoto Institute of Technology (KIT) in Japan also used information on specific buildings and other locations taken from Open Street Map, a free, public geographic database.
Combined with the tweets, they were able to identify when and where people expressed a range of emotions from anticipation and disgust to surprise and delight.
While the cities’ transport links seemed to be a major source of frustration, tweets from hotels and restaurants showcased much higher levels of joy, according to the study.
Specific events were also associated with people’s emotions – for example, New Year’s Eve coincided with more excitement and happiness in both London and San Francisco.
However, the day of the 2017 Women’s March, a protest after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president, showed huge increases in levels of anger, disgust, and sadness in San Francisco.
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Researchers caution against overgeneralising the results of the study, given it only considered tweets in English, however, they believe this kind of data could inform industries such as urban planning and tourism.
Panote Siriaraya, of KIT, said: “Our study highlights how it is possible to portray the characteristics of fine-grained emotions at a detailed spatial and temporal level throughout a whole city, using publicly available data sources.”
The peer-reviewed findings have been published in the journal PLOS ONE.
