Understanding the Emotional Intelligence Discourse on Social Media: Insights from the Analysis of Twitter

Abstract

Social networks have created an information diffusion corpus that provides users with an environment where they can express their views, form a community, and discuss topics of similar or dissimilar interests. Even though there has been an increasingly rising demand for conducting an emotional analysis of the users on social media platforms, the field of emotional intelligence (EI) has been rather slow in exploiting the enormous potential that social media can play in the research and practice of the framework. This study, thus, tried to examine the role that the microblogging platform Twitter plays in enhancing the understanding of the EI community by building on the Twitter Analytics framework of Natural Language Processing to further develop the insights of EI research and practice. An analysis was conducted on 53,361 tweets extracted using the hashtag emotional intelligence through descriptive analytics (DA), content analytics (CA), and network analytics (NA). The findings indicated that emotional intelligence tweets are used mostly by speakers, psychologists (or other medical professionals), and business organizations, among others. They use it for information dissemination, communication with stakeholders, and hiring. These tweets carry strong positive sentiments and sparse connectedness. The findings present insights into the use of social media for understanding emotional intelligence.

Keywords

• emotional intelligence
• Twitter
• social media
• emotional analysis
• sentiment analysis
• network analytics