Emotional States vs. Emotional Words in Social Media

A number of social media studies have equated people's emotional states with the frequency with which they use affectively positive and negative words in their posts. We explore how such word frequencies relate to a ground truth measure of both positive and negative emotion for 515 Facebook users and 448 Twitter users. We find statistically significant but very weak (ρ in the 0.1 to 0.2 range) correlations between positive and negative...