Anger is More Influential Than Joy: Sentiment Correlation in Weibo

TL;DR

This paper analyzes sentiment influence in Weibo, revealing that anger spreads more rapidly and broadly than joy, with stronger correlations among highly interactive users and those with many friends.

Contribution

It provides new insights into sentiment correlation patterns in Weibo, highlighting the dominance of anger and the influence of user interactions on sentiment spread.

Findings

Anger has higher correlation than joy among users.

Sentiment correlation increases with user interactions.

Users with more friends exert greater sentiment influence.

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the tremendous growth of the online social media. In China, Weibo, a Twitter-like service, has attracted more than 500 million users in less than four years. Connected by online social ties, different users influence each other emotionally. We find the correlation of anger among users is significantly higher than that of joy, which indicates that angry emotion could spread more quickly and broadly in the network. While the correlation of sadness is surprisingly low and highly fluctuated. Moreover, there is a stronger sentiment correlation between a pair of users if they share more interactions. And users with larger number of friends posses more significant sentiment influence to their neighborhoods. Our findings could provide insights for modeling sentiment influence and propagation in online social networks.