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

Previous Articles     Next Articles

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

PDF (PC)

832

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
[1] HATFIELD E, CACIOPPO J T, RAPSON R L. Emotional contagion[M]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
[2] KAHNEMAN D, KRUEGER A B, SCHKADE D, et al. Would you be happier if you were richer? A focusing illusion[J]. Science, 2006, 312(5782):1908-1910.
[3] EASTERLIN R A. Explaining happiness[J]. University of South California Legal Working Paper, 2003, 100(19):11176-11183.
[4] BURKE K A, FRANZ T M, MILLER D N, et al. The role of the orbitofrontal cortex in the pursuit of happiness and more specific rewards[J]. Nature, 2008, 454(7202):340-344.
[5] BOLLEN J, GONÇALVES B, RUAN G, et al. Happiness is assortative in online social networks[J]. Artificial Life, 2011, 17(3):237-251.
[6] HOFFMAN M L. How automatic and representational is empathy, and why[J]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2002, 25(1):38-39.
[7] FOWLER J H, CHRISTAKIS N A. Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study[J]. BMJ, 2008, 337:a2338.
[8] ROSENQUIST J N, FOWLER J H, CHRISTAKIS N A. Social network determinants of depression[J]. Molecular Psychiatry, 2011, 16(3):273-281.
[9] CACIOPPO J T, FOWLER J H, CHRISTAKIS N A. Alone in the crowd: the structure and spread of loneliness in a large social network[J]. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2009, 97(6):977.
[10] GOLEMAN D. E-mail is easy to write(and to misread)[N]. New York: Times, 2007-10-07.
[11] WALTHER J B, LOH T, GRANKA L. Let me count the ways the interchange of verbal and nonverbal cues in computer-mediated and face-to-face affinity[J]. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 2005, 24(1):36-65.
[12] HANCOCK J T, LANDRIGAN C, SILVER C. Expressing emotion in text-based communication[C] //Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 2007: 929-932.
[13] HANCOCK J T, GEE K, CIACCIO K, et al. Im sad youre sad: emotional contagion in CMC[C] //Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. New York: ACM, 2008: 295-298.
[14] GUILLORY J, SPIEGEL J, DRISLANE M, et al. Upset now?: emotion contagion in distributed groups[C] //Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 2011: 745-748.
[15] KRAMER A D I. The spread of emotion via Facebook[C] //Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 2012: 767-770.
[16] KRAMER A D I, GUILLORY J E, HANCOCK J T. Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks[J]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014, 111(24):8788-8790..
[17] COVIELLO L, SOHN Y, KRAMER A D I, et al. Detecting emotional contagion in massive social networks[J]. PloS One, 2014, 9(3):e90315.
[18] KWAK H, LEE C, PARK H, et al. What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?[C] //Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web. New York: ACM, 2010: 591-600.
[19] JAVA A, SONG X, FININ T, et al. Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities[C] //Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 Workshop on Web Mining and Social Network Analysis. New York: ACM, 2007: 56-65.
[20] JOINSON A N. Looking at, looking up or keeping up with people?: motives and use of facebook[C] //Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 2008:1027-1036.
[21] PANGER G. Social comparison in social media: a look at facebook and twitter[C] //CHI'14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 2014:2095-2100.
[22] PENNEBAKER J W, CHUNG C K, IRELAND M, et al. The development and psychological properties of LIWC2007[J]. Austin, 2007, 29(11):1020-1025.
[23] AHN Y Y, HAN S, KWAK H, et al. Analysis of topological characteristics of huge online social networking services[C] //Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web. New York: ACM, 2007:835-844.
[24] MCPHERSON M, SMITH-LOVIN L, COOK J M. Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks[J]. Annual Review of Sociology, 2001, 27:415-444.
[25] CENTOLA D. The spread of behavior in an online social network experiment[J]. Science, 2010, 329(5996):1194-1197.
[26] FOWLER J H, CHRISTAKIS N A. Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks[J]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010, 107(12):5334-5338.
[27] CENTOLA D. An experimental study of homophily in the adoption of health behavior[J]. Science, 2011, 334(6060):1269-1272.
[28] ARAL S, WALKER D. Identifying influential and susceptible members of social networks[J]. Science, 2012, 337(6092):337-341.
[29] GRANGER C W J. Investigating causal relations by econometric models and cross-spectral methods[J]. Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society, 1969,37(3):424-438.
[30] HURLIN C, VENET B. Granger causality tests in panel data models with fixed coefficients[J]. Document De Recherche Leo, 2001:1-31.
[31] DICKEY D A, BELL W R, MILLER R B. Unit roots in time series models: Tests and implications[J]. The American Statistician, 1986, 40(1):12-26.
[32] LEVIN A, LIN C F, CHU C S J. Unit root tests in panel data: asymptotic and finite-sample properties[J]. Journal of Econometrics, 2002, 108(1):1-24.
[33] I M K S, PESARAN M H, SHIN Y. Testing for unit roots in heterogeneous panels[J]. Journal of Econometrics, 2003, 115(1):53-74.
[34] MADDALA G S, WU S. A comparative study of unit root tests with panel data and a new simple test[J]. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 1999, 61(S1):631-652.
[35] PHILLIPS P C B, PERRON P. Testing for a unit root in time series regression[J]. Biometrika, 1986, 75(2):335-346.
[1] SUI Yun-xian, LIU Yong. Mining algorithm of E-burt structural hole based on two-step neighbor [J]. JOURNAL OF SHANDONG UNIVERSITY(NATURAL SCIENCE), 2017, 52(9): 59-68.
[2] ZHANG Zhong-jun, ZHANG Wen-juan, YU Lai-hang, LI Run-chuan. A community division method based on network distance and content similarity in micro-blog social network [J]. JOURNAL OF SHANDONG UNIVERSITY(NATURAL SCIENCE), 2017, 52(7): 97-103.
[3] DENG Xiao-fang, ZHONG Yuan-sheng, L(¨overU)Lin-yuan, WANG Ming-wen, XIONG Nai-xue. Mass diffusion on coupled social networks [J]. JOURNAL OF SHANDONG UNIVERSITY(NATURAL SCIENCE), 2017, 52(3): 51-59.
[4] ZHU Sheng, ZHOU Bin, ZHU Xiang. EIP: discovering influential bloggers by user similarity and topic timeliness [J]. JOURNAL OF SHANDONG UNIVERSITY(NATURAL SCIENCE), 2016, 51(9): 113-120.
[5] CAI Hong-yun, MA Xiao-xue. Access control based on relationship strength for online social network [J]. JOURNAL OF SHANDONG UNIVERSITY(NATURAL SCIENCE), 2016, 51(7): 90-97.
[6] FANG Wei-wei1,2, LI Jing-yuan1, LIU Yue1, YU Zhi-hua1, CAO Peng1,2, ZHANG Kai1. Research of Twitter data collection [J]. J4, 2012, 47(5): 73-77.
[7] LI Qi1,2, MA Jun1,2*. Person′s name disambiguation based on person  related social communities [J]. J4, 2012, 47(3): 33-37.
[8] WANG Fang, GUO Hua-Ping, NIU Chang-Yong, FAN Ming. New email community clustering method based on EVS similarity   [J]. J4, 2010, 45(3): 34-40.
Viewed
Full text


Abstract

Cited
  Shared   
  Discussed   
No Suggested Reading articles found!
Copyright 2018 © Editorial office of JOURNAL OF SHANDONG UNIVERSITY(NATURAL SCIENCE)
Supported by Beijing Magtech Co.Ltd