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On the influence of emotional valence shifts on the spread of information in social networks

Kušen,Ema
; 
Strembeck,Mark
; 
Cascavilla,Giuseppe
; 
Conti,Mauro
Abstract
In this paper, we present a study on 4.4 million Twitter messages related to 24 systematically chosen real-world events. For each of the 4.4 million tweets, we first extracted sentiment scores based on the eight basic emotions according to Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. Subsequently, we investigated the effects of shifts in the emotional valence on the spread of information. We found that in general OSN users tend to conform to the emotional valence of the respective real-world event. However, we also found empirical evidence that prospectively negative real-world events exhibit a significant amount of shifted emotions in the corresponding tweets (i.e. positive messages). To explain this finding, we use the theory of social connection and emotional contagion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that provides empirical evidence for the undoing hypothesis in online social networks (OSNs). The undoing hypothesis postulates that positive emotions serve as an antidote during negative events.
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Publisher Copyright: © 2017 Association for Computing Machinery.
Date
2017-07-31
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Association for Computing Machinery
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Tilburg University Research Output Collection
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Keywords
Diffusion, Sentiment analysis, Twitter
Citation
Kušen, E, Strembeck, M, Cascavilla, G & Conti, M 2017, On the influence of emotional valence shifts on the spread of information in social networks. in J Diesner, E Ferrari & G Xu (eds), Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2017. Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2017, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 321-324, 9th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2017, Sydney, Australia, 31/07/17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3110025.3110031
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14602/25979
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