Emotional Contagion : From Streamers’ Facial Expressions to Twitch.tv Chat

Live streaming is becoming a more popular media entertainment form each year. It enables real-time communications among the viewers and the streamers. By interacting with the streamer, viewers express, among other things, their emotion through text messages and emotes. On the other hand, by interacting with the viewers, streamers express a variety of emotions verbally and through facial expressions. Subsequently, the other party might experience and express similar emotions as well. This phenomenon is called emotional contagion. In this research, I analyze the emotions of streamers’ facial expressions and then study the correlation with the sentiment in the preceding and subsequent chat messages of their viewers on the platform Twitch.tv. This study finds weak correlations between the emotions of streamers’ facial expressions and the sentiment of viewers’ chat messages. I conclude this paper by discussing the results in more detail and giving directions for future work.