Mapping the Online Reviews Sentiment Landscape: An Exploration of Emotion Spectrum in User Reviews of Mobile Apps

Mobile applications have emerged as powerful platforms for consumers and understanding the attitudes and reactions of users by content and emotional sides in a mobile context becomes crucial for marketing decision-making. The study with comprehensive approach aims to analyze the emotion spectrum in mobile applications user reviews context by examining specific emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, neutral, sadness, surprise). Sentiment analysis methodology (through "Emotion English DistilRoBERTa-base" transformers-model) is employed on the dataset of 302.647 reviews from 34 mobile application categories. Categorical examination of emotions indicates that neutrality is the dominant emotion category, followed by joy, sadness, disgust, surprise, and anger emotion categories, while the fear category is the least dominant category. According to polarity examination; negative polarity reviews are associated with neutral, sadness and disgust emotions; neutral polarity reviews are associated with neutral and sadness; positive polarity reviews are associated with neutral and joy emotion categories. Final part of analysis includes examination of emotions individually and mobile app categories which each emotion with the highest frequency of dominance are presented. The distribution rates of emotions and the individual relationships of emotions with different application categories can shed light on future academic research and marketing decision-making.