Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Data Mining Reveals the Emotional Differences In Emails From Men and Women

Posted by Soulskill on from the men-are-from-yahoo,-women-are-from-outlook dept.

KentuckyFC writes "Sentiment analysis relies on vast databases of common words which are marked as positive, negative or neutral and associated with one of the eight fundamental emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, discuss, anger and anticipation. It is then a straightforward matter to search Tweets, novels and even fairy tales to see what emotions appear. Now, researchers have carried out the first large-scale study of sentiment in workplace emails. They examined the emotions associated with words in over 30,000 emails and analyzed the emotional differences between messages sent by men and women. It turns out that women use more cheerful words in emails than men, that men use more fear words, especially when communicating with other men, and that both men and women are far more likely to use anticipation words when emailing a member of the opposite sex. The same researchers say they are developing a Google app that will allow users to track their own emotions towards the people they correspond with in Gmail. And they plan to make a public call for volunteers willing to share their data for research purposes."

13 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Other findings by TWiTfan · · Score: 5, Funny

    1) Men's emails are 90% more likely to include the word "balls" than women's.
    2) Men are 74% less likely to ever email someone a link to an Oprah Magazine story.
    3) No man has ever used the phrase "K, Luv Ya!" in an email, ever.

    --
    The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
    1. Re:Other findings by bondsbw · · Score: 4, Funny

      In other news, today we found out that at least 0.00007% of Slashdot users believe that discussion comments are email.

      --
      All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
  2. Discuss? by i_ate_god · · Score: 2

    I'm not sure I ever felt discussing, though since I'm discussing it, I guess... I am discussed.

    --
    I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
    1. Re:Discuss? by tsprig · · Score: 2

      I get extremely disgusted when people confuse discuss and disgust. One is an emotion. One is what women always do. One is an emotion you can see on women's faces when they look towards a slashdot user.

      That's three you discussing swine!

  3. What the F$&*? Talk about a big fat fallacy! by s.petry · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Of course men and women use different language in their emails. Young men would use different language than middle aged or older people do. A person emailing a friend would have different language than when they email their boss. This is not indicative of there "emotions". This is indicative of their education, wisdom, and who they are having a conversation with and the topics of discussion.

    This whole article discusses work done on an absolutely false premise. Emails can not be used to determine your emotional state, any more than tweets can not be used to determine your psychological state.

    Pack it in you eugenics morons! We are on to your game!

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  4. Fascinating! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Fascinating!

    Let's try the same thing with song lyrics:

    Mama Cass:

    Stars shining bright above you
    Night breezes seem to whisper "I love you"
    Birds singing in the sycamore tree
    Dream a little dream of me
    Say "Night-ie night" and kiss me
    Just hold me tight and tell me you'll miss me
    While I'm alone and blue as can be
    Dream a little dream of me
    Stars fading but I linger on, dear
    Still craving your kiss
    I'm longing to linger till dawn, dear
    Just saying this
    Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you
    Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you
    But in your dreams whatever they be
    Dream a little dream of me

    And DJ Assault:

    (2x)
    Ass, titties, ass 'n titties
    Ass ass titties titties, ass 'n titties

    (2x)
    Big booty bitches thats where it gets
    Come on, hoe, let's go to the easy rest
    When I see ass, titties, ass 'n titties
    Ass, ass, titties, titties, ass 'n titties.

    (4x)
    Ass, ass, ass, ass

    (2x)
    If you a light-skinned bitch that think you the shit,
    I can buy you, hoe, 'cause bitch I'm rich.
    I see broke-ass hoes, broke-ass hoes,
    Broke-ass hoes, broke-ass hoes.

    (4x)
    Hoes, hoes, hoes, hoes

    (2x)
    If you a freaky-dancin' ho, keep shakin' that shit
    Let's see how you shake it on top of my dick
    And you'll say "Assault, I'm cuming. Assault, I'm cuming.
    "Assault, I'm cuming. Assault, I'm cuming."

    (4x)
    Cumin', Cumin', Cumin', Cumin'

    (2x)
    Stankin ass bitches that need to wash up
    Dont get mad when i dont want to fuck
    You need soap and water, soap and water
    Soap and water, Soap and Water

    (4x)
    Water, Water, Water, Water

    The difference is subtle, but in my opinion quite discernible.

  5. That's sexist! by pla · · Score: 5, Funny

    Males and females have absolutely no difference between them, despite the overwhelming experiential, physiological, neurological, anatomical, and hormonal evidence to the contrary, you sexist pigs, and how dare you even conduct this research into the issue!

    Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go open a jar of mayo for the little lady, though that in no way suggests she lacks the wrist and forearm strength to grasp and twist just as well as any man.

    1. Re:That's sexist! by WSOGMM · · Score: 2

      Males and females have absolutely no difference between them, despite the overwhelming experiential, physiological, neurological, anatomical, and hormonal evidence to the contrary, you sexist pigs, and how dare you even conduct this research into the issue! Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go open a jar of mayo for the little lady, though that in no way suggests she lacks the wrist and forearm strength to grasp and twist just as well as any man.

      I find your sentiment absolutely discussing!!

    2. Re:That's sexist! by Guy+Harris · · Score: 2

      Being larger makes boys better at sports.

      Being larger makes a person better at sports where greater size (which is probably a proxy for muscle mass here) is an advantage. I'm not certain that, in all sports, a big muscle-bound person would be better than, say, a slim wiry person.

      Boys are, on average, larger, but, then, the average person has (approximately) one ovary and one testicle. A larger boy would be better than a smaller boy at a sport where greater size is an advantage, but a larger girl might be better than that same smaller boy at that sport.

    3. Re:That's sexist! by TangoMargarine · · Score: 2

      I didn't say anything about the ratio of nature to nurture. I'm just saying society sometimes tells me a term I use solely to describe a certain group of people--with no intention of implied connotations--is unacceptable because apparently society can't use any word to describe the group without someone considering it a slur. I'm a programmer. I call a duck a fucking duck.

      wisnoskij says there's no such thing as race; you say race is an indicator for intelligence. I think I should put you two in a cage with polearms and wait until you've beaten each other senseless.

      P.S: I'm talking about the United States. Slashdot is hosted in the U.S., is in English, and largely deals with U.S. issues. So bite me, European pedants.

      --
      Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
  6. Browser history is even more revealing by Krishnoid · · Score: 4, Funny

    Even the most basic data mining can reveal a lot about your hopes and dreams.

  7. "fear" words et al by ESRB · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Even the journal article linked to by the blog seems to be scant on details. I was hoping there'd at least be a few appendices on these things, but no such luck. Anyone know exactly what "joy words," "fear words," et al are?

    Thanks in advance.

    1. Re:"fear" words et al by waddleman · · Score: 3, Informative

      From the research paper:

      The lexicon has entries for about 24,200 word–sense pairs. The information from different senses of a word is combined by taking the union of all emotions associated with the different senses of the word. This resulted in a word-level emotion association lexicon for about 14,200 word types. These files are together referred to as the NRC Emotion Lexicon version 0.92.