title: Mood and the market: can press reports of investors' mood predict stock prices?
abstract: We examined whether press reports on the collective mood of investors can predict changes in stock prices. We collected data on the use of emotion words in newspaper reports on traders' affect, coded these emotion words according to their location on an affective circumplex in terms of pleasantness and activation level, and created indices of collective mood for each trading day. Then, by using time series analyses, we examined whether these mood indices, depicting investors' emotion on a given trading day, could predict the next day's opening price of the stock market. The strongest findings showed that activated pleasant mood predicted increases in NASDAQ prices, while activated unpleasant mood predicted decreases in NASDAQ prices. We conclude that both valence and activation levels of collective mood are important in predicting trend continuation in stock prices.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Baruch College and Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, New York, United States of America.
authors.forename: Yochi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Cohen-Charash
authors.forename: Charles A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Scherbaum
authors.forename: John D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Kammeyer-Mueller
authors.forename: Barry M
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Staw
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D003132:Commerce; D006801:Humans; D007449:Investments; D008399:Mass Behavior; D009524:Newspapers as Topic; D058028:Research Report