  Online and in the real world, communities are bonded together by emotional
consensus around core issues. Emotional responses to scientific findings often
play a pivotal role in these core issues. When there is too much diversity of
opinion on topics of science, emotions flare up and give rise to conflict. This
conflict threatens positive outcomes for research. Emotions have the power to
shape how people process new information. They can color the public's
understanding of science, motivate policy positions, even change lives. And yet
little work has been done to evaluate the public's emotional response to
science using quantitative methods. In this paper, we use a dataset of
responses to scholarly articles on Facebook to analyze the dynamics of
emotional valence, intensity, and diversity. We present a novel way of
weighting click-based reactions that increases their comprehensibility, and use
these weighted reactions to develop new metrics of aggregate emotional
responses. We use our metrics along with LDA topic models and statistical
testing to investigate how users' emotional responses differ from one
scientific topic to another. We find that research articles related to gender,
genetics, or agricultural/environmental sciences elicit significantly different
emotional responses from users than other research topics. We also find that
there is generally a positive response to scientific research on Facebook, and
that articles generating a positive emotional response are more likely to be
widely shared---a conclusion that contradicts previous studies of other social
media platforms.
