Relationships between Periodic Behaviors in Micro-blogging and the Users´ Baseline Mood

Twitter messages are real-time, spontaneous reports of what the users are feeling, thinking, and doing. The frequency of posting "Tweets" oscillates periodically in one-day and seven-day cycles. These periodic patterns may be related to the individual users\´ baseline affective state. In order to investigate individual periodic behavior in social media, we performed a Fourier series expansion and PCA on intra-week Tweet-frequency changes of 11,570 individuals. Moreover, the relationships between the users\´ baseline mood and the principal component scores were investigated. High frequency in daytime tweets on weekdays was found to be linked to a low positive affective state. The larger number of posting tweets was related to the negative affective state.