Evaluating the Emotional Contagion and Neuroticism in the Tweets of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Sajith Premadasa and Their Followers During Social Protest Movements in Sri Lanka

The linguistic manifestations of emotional contagion and personality traits, such as neuroticism, are understudied areas in cyberpsychology research. Thus, after social protest movements in Sri Lanka, a range of qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted to evaluate the level of emotional contagion present among the discourse of Sri Lankan Twitter users, with a focus on neuroticism, during the five-day period at the start of the “GoHomeGota” protests. Content analyses found followers of Sajith Premadasa were less likely to exhibit negative aspects of neuroticism in their tweets, compared to the followers of Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Sentiment analyses corroborate the content analyses, while a qualitative examination of highly negatively valenced tweets showed followers of each politician directed their criticism at different targets. Meanwhile, social network analyses showed that the networks of followers and protestors of these two politicians, while similar in some respects, were markedly distinct in others. Future research on these areas should utilize more sophisticated data analysis tools, as this study was limited by the use of free and open-source software.