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Burstiness in Emotions: A Case Study on Collective Affective Responses in Italian Soccer Fandoms

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Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 15211))

Abstract

The bursty nature of emotions is rarely investigated outside cognitive and psychological studies. Therefore this work addresses a gap in the literature, investigating the phenomenon of emotional burstiness using tools from the analysis of complex systems, and considering as case-study soccer fans’ affective responses on social media. We reconstruct collective reactions on Instagram posts from official accounts of 40 Italian football teams during the first round of the 2023–2024 season – 20 teams from Serie B (the second tier of Italian Football) and the 20 most followed teams in Serie C (the third tier). With this data, we build sequences of emotional signals for four types of emotions: joy, anger, sadness, and fear. Our analysis reveals trends of anti-burstiness in expressions of joy among users, reflecting fans’ consistent support for teams, occasionally interspersed by bursts of anger and sadness, with no signals of fear. This preliminary investigation provides insights for the understanding of emotional dynamics in online discussions and team supporting in soccer leagues.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023-24_Serie_B.

  2. 2.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023-24_Serie_C.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/MilaNLProc/feel-it.

  4. 4.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023-24_Brescia_Calcio_season.

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Acknowledgment

This project was funded by SoBigData.it which receives funding from the European Union – NextGenerationEU – National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza, PNRR) – Project: “SoBigData.it – Strengthening the Italian RI for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics” – Prot. IR0000013 – Avviso n. 3264 del 28/12/2021.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNR-ISTI, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi, 1, Pisa, Italy

    Salvatore Citraro & Giovanni Mauro

  2. University of Pisa, Largo Bruno Pontecorvo, 3, Pisa, Italy

    Giovanni Mauro

  3. IMT Lucca, Piazza S. Francesco, 19, Lucca, Italy

    Giovanni Mauro

  4. SciencesPo, Rue Saint Guillaume, 27, Paris, France

    Emanuele Ferragina

Authors
  1. Salvatore Citraro
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  2. Giovanni Mauro
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  3. Emanuele Ferragina
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Contributions

S.C. conceptualized the research, conducted the experiments, made the plots, wrote the code and the paper. G.M. conceptualized the research, supervised the experiments and wrote the paper. E.F. supervised the research and wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Salvatore Citraro .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Luca Maria Aiello

  2. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, Delhi, India

    Tanmoy Chakraborty

  3. Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Sabrina Gaito

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Citraro, S., Mauro, G., Ferragina, E. (2025). Burstiness in Emotions: A Case Study on Collective Affective Responses in Italian Soccer Fandoms. In: Aiello, L.M., Chakraborty, T., Gaito, S. (eds) Social Networks Analysis and Mining. ASONAM 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15211. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78541-2_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78541-2_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-78540-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-78541-2

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