Social spider optimization (SSO) is a swarm algorithm designed for solving complex optimization problems. It is an effective approach for searching a global optimum by simulating the cooperative behavior of social-spiders. However, SSO takes too much computation time and shows premature convergence on some problems. In order to accelerate the computation speed and further enhance the search ability, a parallel SSO (PSSO) algorithm with emotional learning is proposed in this paper. First, we develop a parallel structure for the female and male individuals to update their positions, and each individual can be computed in parallel during the search process. Second, an emotional learning mechanism is used to increase swarm diversity which is helpful to improve the search performance. Furthermore, the convergence property and computational complexity of PSSO are discussed in detail. To test the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, it is applied to solve data clustering problem. The experimental results demonstrate that the overall performance of PSSO is superior to six other clustering algorithms on several standard data sets. In the aspect of search performance, the results obtained by PSSO are better than the comparison algorithms in most used data sets. In the aspect of time performance, the computation time of PSSO is greatly reduced in the parallel computing environment. It is comparable with K-means which is the fastest among the comparison algorithms when the number of processors larger than and equals to 16.