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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 7: Social Systems, Opinion and Group Dynamics I
SOE 7.2: Talk
Monday, March 14, 2011, 16:15–16:30, GÖR 226
Negative emotions as a fuel for discussion in cyber communities — •Anna Chmiel1, Julian Sienkiewicz1, Georgios Paltoglou2, Kevan Buckley2, Mike Thelwall2, and Janusz A. Hołyst1 — 1Faculty of Physics, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland — 2School of Computing and IT, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK
We focus on the influence of emotion on the behavior of Internet forum users and the vitality of online debates. We collected a large set of records describing comments expressed in diverse cyber communities such as blogs, fora and the Digg community. The text was then evaluated using classifiers that were able to estimate emotional valence values. We show that affective interactions do exist in Internet communities and they lead to attractive forces. As a result of collective behaviour there are clusters of comments possessing a similar level of emotional valence that are much longer than they would be if they were created by a random process. The presence of longer clusters of coherent emotional expressions therefore increases the possibility of attaching to this cluster a comment with the same emotion. At BBC Forum the majority of comments possess a negative emotional valence and threads starting from a larger number of negative comments last longer so negative emotions can be treated as a kind of discussion fuel. Users can take part in many threads, thus their local and global activities and corresponding emotions can be very different. We show that an increase in activity in the discussion of a particular thread is connected with more negative emotions from the user in the thread.