Sentiment Analysis and Affective Computing: Methods and Applications

New computing technologies, such as affective computing and sentiment analysis, are raising a strong interest in different fields, such as marketing, politics and, recently, life sciences. Examples of possible applications in the last field, regard the detection and monitoring of depressive states or mood disorders and anxiety conditions. This paper aims to provide an introductory overview of affective computing and sentiment analysis, through the discussion of the main processing techniques and applications. The paper concludes with a discussion relative to a new approach based on the integration of sentiment analysis and affective computing to obtain a more accurate and reliable detection of emotions and feelings for applications in the life sciences.