Cross-Cultural Reactions to Crisis Events via Language and Emoticon Use

Abstract

We analyze language and emoticon use on a social media platform to describe large-scale human reaction to a crisis event. We focus on a targeted corpus of 2 million tweets defined by a set of hashtags and posted on the social media platform Twitter. We analyze these data under the framework of Construal Level Theory and compute lexical diversity and concreteness values of words across subsets of the data that differ with respect to geographical distance from the event. We find that word count and lexical variation among concrete words (but not average concreteness) decreased with increasing geographical distance. In addition, we investigate the use of non-verbal signals through the use of emoticons and emojis in these subsets. Overall, our findings make significant contributions in quantifying and contrasting cross-cultural communication with respect to large-scale human response to a crisis event, specifically a terrorist attack. The results presented here are novel in that they demonstrate what we learn from large-scale nonverbal as well as verbal communication analyzed in the framework of the Construal Level Theory.