transforEmotion in Practice: Multimodal Emotion Analysis in R

Vanderbilt QMDA Colloquium

Aleksandar Tomašević
atomasevic@ipb.ac.rs

Scientific Computing Laboratory, Institute of Physics Belgrade, University of Belgrade

January 5, 2026

About Me

  • PhD in Sociology
  • Institute of Physics, University of Belgrade
  • Fulbright Visiting Scholar at University of Virginia
  • Research interests:
    • Emotional aspects of political communication
    • Computational methods for social sciences
    • Network dynamics of emotions

Face of Populism: Emotional Expressions of Populist Leaders

Research Project

  • Large-scale study of non-verbal political communication (Major and Tomašević 2025)
  • Analyzed emotional expressions of political leaders
  • 220 YouTube videos, global coverage
  • Based on CNNs (6 basic emotions + neutral)
  • Populist leaders show higher negative emotion scores and lower neutrality