collective emotions online and their influence on community life集体的情感网络和对社会生活的影响.pdfVIP

Collective Emotions Online and Their Influence on Community Life 1 1 2 2 2 3 Anna Chmiel , Julian Sienkiewicz , Mike Thelwall , Georgios Paltoglou , Kevan Buckley , Arvid Kappas , Janusz A. Hołyst 1* 1 Center of Excellence for Complex Systems Research, Faculty of Physics, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland, 2 Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, School of Technology, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, United Kingdom, 3 School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany Abstract Background: E-communities, social groups interacting online, have recently become an object of interdisciplinary research. As with face-to-face meetings, Internet exchanges may not only include factual information but also emotional information – how participants feel about the subject discussed or other group members. Emotions in turn are known to be important in affecting interaction partners in offline communication in many ways. Could emotions in Internet exchanges affect others and systematically influence quantitative and qualitative aspects of the trajectory of e-communities? The development of automatic sentiment analysis has made large scale emotion detection and analysis possible using text messages collected from the web. However, it is not clear if emotions in e-communities primarily derive from individual group members’ personalities or if they result from intra-group interactions, and whether they influence group activities. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here, for the first time, we show the collective character of affective phenomena on a large scale as observed in four million posts downloaded from Blogs, Digg and BB