The invention includes a method and a device for determining an emotive index for a message. In the method, a message is received and words in the message are identified for analysis. An emotive index corresponding to the identified words is then determined. The emotive index is preferably a function of a word count index corresponding to the number of identified words, an affinity index and an antagonism index. A device according to the present invention includes a computer readable storage medium having encoded thereon computer readable instructions capable of instructing a computer to carry out the method.