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The Boston Marathon bombing presents a rare opportunity to study how a disruptive event can trigger inter-communal emotions and expressions - where members of one community express feelings about and support for members of a distant community. In this work, we use over 180 million geocoded tweets over an entire month to study how Twitter users from different cities expressed three different emotions: fear, sympathy and solidarity, in reaction to the bombings. We capture spikes in fear in different cities by using sentiment and time-series analyses, and track expressions of sympathy and solidarity based on the emergent use of two hashtags, #prayforboston and #bostonstrong, widely adopted after the bombings. We find first that the extent to which communities outside Boston express these emotions is correlated with their geographic proximity, social network connections, and residents’ direct …