  This article provides a comprehensive investigation on the relations between
virality of news articles and the emotions they are found to evoke. Virality,
in our view, is a phenomenon with many facets, i.e. under this generic term
several different effects of persuasive communication are comprised. By
exploiting a high-coverage and bilingual corpus of documents containing metrics
of their spread on social networks as well as a massive affective annotation
provided by readers, we present a thorough analysis of the interplay between
evoked emotions and viral facets. We highlight and discuss our findings in
light of a cross-lingual approach: while we discover differences in evoked
emotions and corresponding viral effects, we provide preliminary evidence of a
generalized explanatory model rooted in the deep structure of emotions: the
Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) circumplex. We find that viral facets appear to
be consistently affected by particular VAD configurations, and these
configurations indicate a clear connection with distinct phenomena underlying
persuasive communication.
