The Expression of Emotions on Instagram.

This preliminary research study examines women farmers on Instagram who use the hashtag #womenwhofarm. We investigate the emotional valence of these posts using a multimodal analysis of both text and images. Previous research has found a positivity bias on Instagram, wherein users predominantly express themselves with a positive emotional tone. Using open-ended coding of 651 Instagram posts, this study finds that women farmers use mostly neutral emotional tonality in their images and text content. The study points to a need for disambiguation between different affective terminology in research on emotions in social media and highlights the need for continued theorization on the relationship between images and emotions.