The Impact of Emotional Valence on Lexical Choice in Social Media: A Corpus-Based Psycholinguistic Study

This paper examines the role of emotional valence (positive vs. negative emotion) in lexical choice in social media communication, using Twitter as an example. It makes such a comparison between personal (individual users) and professional (organizational accounts) situations based on the Affect Infusion Model (Forgas, 1995), Pollyanna Hypothesis (Boucher and Osgood, 1969), and Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. A balanced corpus of 32 simulated English tweets was examined using a mixed-methods approach, using quantitative (lexical frequency, Type-Token Ratio) and qualitative discourse interpretation (tone, framing, figurative language) measures. Results showed that personal tweets had more lexical variety, figurative speech, and emotional variability; the professional tweets were more positive, formal, and relatively unemotional, especially in the negative contexts.