Why Do Urban Legends Go Viral?
Table 4: Average Sentiment and Emotions
['[EMPTY]', 'POS_sent  [ITALIC] μ', 'POS_sent  [ITALIC] σ', 'NEG_sent  [ITALIC] μ', 'NEG_sent  [ITALIC] σ', 'ALL_sent  [ITALIC] μ', 'ALL_sent  [ITALIC] σ']
As can be seen, in the SENT group of features the differences are less marked and, quite surprisingly, ULs have the lowest scores. As we would expect, FTs have the highest score. In fact, affective impact can either derive from the wording of the text itself (usage of strong affect words), or from the depicted situation (i.e. emotions are evoked by describing a vivid situation with a plain language). In our experiment we tested the ‘wording’ using SENT features while the ‘evoked emotions’ with the EMO features. So, UL seem to use a plain and objective language, similar to GN, to gain credibility, but tend to evoke strong emotions (similar to FT) to be catchy. Let us consider the “Kidney Theft” excerpt described in Section 1, as stated, there is no very strong emotional wording in this UL , it is the depicted situation that is scary per se.