JOURNAL OF SHANDONG UNIVERSITY(NATURAL SCIENCE) ›› 2016, Vol. 51 ›› Issue (1): 71-76.doi: 10.6040/j.issn.1671-9352.1.2015.053

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Emotional contagion in Twitter

ZHANG Shao-qun, WEI Jing-jing, LIAO Xiang-wen*, JIAN Si-yuan, CHEN Guo-long   

  1. College of Mathematics and Computer Science, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350116, Fujian, China
  • Received:2015-07-27 Online:2016-01-16 Published:2016-11-29

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Abstract: It is a problem to be solved in social science whether there exists the phenomenon of emotional contagion in Twitter. The emotion time series of 106 641 users in the Twitter social network were got by the LIWC2007. Then a serious of unit root tests were used to validate that the time series are stable. Through the Granger causality test, the emotion variable of the users' followees in the past time was added to the regression equation to predict the users' emotion and then the statistical hypothesis tests was used to prove the regression coefficient of the variable was significantly not equal to 0, which indicated that the users' emotion could be influenced by their followees' emotional expression in the past time, which meaned that the emotion expressed by users' followees was the Granger cause of the emotion expressed by users. At the same time, the same method proved that the emotion expressed by users was not the Granger cause of the emotion expressed by users followees. Since the social selection was a type of bidirectional relationship, this phenomenon was caused by emotional contagion. Furthermore, the statistical results showed that most of the unidirectional followees in Twitter were not acquaintances in real life but most of the bidirectional followees in Twitter were acquaintances in real life. The results of the Granger causality also suggested that the people, either acquaintances or not acquaintances, could spread their emotion to others in Twitter.

Key words: social network, Granger causality tests, Twitter, emotional contagion

CLC Number: 

  • TP391
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