Emotional User Comments: The Importance of Emotions in the Reception of User Comments on Online News
How public issues from politics and science are perceived and evaluated is closely linked to personal concern and emotional assessment by the recipient. Triggered emotions can be discharged in public discourses and thereby affect an objective negotiation process. In the social web, recipients become producers and sometimes express uninhibited opinions, spread untruths and act insultingly. As part of her dissertation, she deals with emotions and emotionalization processes in connection and network communication.
The aim of the dissertation is to explain the development of emotions in and through online comments using a theoretical model. The model aims to combine psychological and sociological processes in online environments. The assumption is that the emergence of emotions can be justified by well-known social scientific theories and concepts and does not have to be understood as a new phenomenon.
The focus of the work is an extensive interdisciplinary examination of theories and research on social behavior and emotions as well as the theorizing of online comment columns as an (emotional) form of communication. The project is justified by the need for theory development by different authors from the discipline.