Open DN Seminar Veronika Koller Analysing emotion in social media comments 30 Jan 2026

Описание: Veronika Koller (University of Lancaster),Analysing emotion in social media comments,

In this talk, I will address how emotion can be expressed, ascribed and afforded in social media comments. I will begin by defining emotions as mental-affective and physiological states and processes that manifest in discourse. As such, they are both individual and collective in nature and form the basis of affective practices (Wetherell 2012). In social media discourse, emotions can be multimodally represented in their physiological, non-verbal and verbal manifestations (see Schiewer et al. 2023: 1612).

After reviewing recent work on emotion in social media discourse, including Papachirissi’s (2014) concept of affective publics, I introduce an affect taxonomy that adapts appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005, Benítez Castro and Hidalgo Tenorio 2019) and extends it to multimodal expressions of emotion. The model distinguishes between authorial and ascribed emotion as well as emotion that is afforded in discourse, i.e., can be elicited in recipients. All three forms can be present explicitly or implicitly. The application of this framework is illustrated with three examples, from social media comments on branding videos, on posts by populist parties and on anti-feminist YouTube videos.

I conclude the talk by discussing remaining issues with analysing emotion in social media comments, notably how ridicule and sarcasm can be integrated into an affect framework.

References

Benítez Castro, M. Á., & Hidalgo Tenorio, E. (2019). Rethinking Martin & White’s affect taxonomy. In Lachlan Mackenzie, J., & Alba-Juez, L. (eds), Emotion in Discourse (pp. 301-331). Benjamins.

Papacharissi, Z. (2014). Affective Publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. Oxford University Press.

Schiewer, G.L., Szczepaniak, J., Pociask, J., Bogacki, J., & Kowalewski, S. (2023). Discourse linguistics and emotion in media. In Schiewer, G.L., Altarriba, J., & Ng, B.C. (eds.) Language and Emotion: An international handbook. Vol. 3 (pp. 1609-1631). De Gruyter.

Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: a new social science understanding. London: Sage.