Methods for Emotional Psychotyping of Cyberspace Actors based on Their Digital Footprints

Abstract

The article proposes an original approach for emotional psychotyping of social network users (actors) based on their digital footprints. Applying the approach results in the assessment of the agentś belonging to 8 emotional classes according to the Heymans - Le Senne typology, which is the psychological basis of our research. We analyze the actorś activities in the format of text messages in cyberspace and propose methods to determine the key criteria such as emotionality, activity, and primacy or secondariness. We analyzed the data of two different groups of a popular Russian Facebook-like social network VK and determined the psychotypes of their active subscribers. We have revealed that in both groups the dominating majority of users (50-60 %) may be classified as “apathetic” and “amorphous The minor part of actors (about 30 %) determine the main activity and emotion dynamics in these communities being “nervous”, “phlegmatic”, and “sanguine”. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the originality of the methods proposed for solving a complex and currently poorly developed problem - determining the character of a person by analyzing their activities in the cyberspace.