Emotions play an important role in interpersonal interactions and social conflict, yet their function in the development of controversy and disagreement in online conversations has not been explored. To address this gap, we study controversy on Reddit, a popular network of online discussion forums. We collect discussions from a wide variety of topical forums and use emotion detection to recognize a range of emotions from text, including anger, fear, joy, admiration, etc. Our study has three main findings. First, controversial comments express more anger and less admiration, joy and optimism than non-controversial comments. Second, controversial comments affect emotions of downstream comments in a discussion, usually resulting in long-term increase in anger and a decrease in positive emotions, although the magnitude and direction of emotional change depends on the forum. Finally, we show that emotions help better predict which comments will become controversial. Understanding emotional dynamics of online discussions can help communities to better manage conversations.

研究了Reddit上的争议性话题以及它们的情感动态，并发现争议性评论表达的愤怒情绪更高，乐观和正面情绪更少；争议性评论会对讨论中后续评论的情感产生影响，通常会导致愤怒情绪的长期增加以及积极情绪的减少，但具体情感变化的幅度和方向取决于讨论主题；情感能够更好地预测哪些评论会变得有争议，从而帮助社区更好地管理讨论。

愤怒引发争议：分析Reddit上的争议和情绪