Psychological Distance and Emotional Attachment in Social Media

This corpus-linguistic study uses naturalistic communication from tweets and USENET email forums to validate the claim that mental representations of events that are remote from here, now, and the self, tend to be less concrete and less emotionally extreme than those of proximate events. Large-scale norming studies of word concreteness and emotionality help quantify how emotionality (happiness and arousal) and level of detail vary with increases in geographic, temporal and social distance.