emotion

The spread of anger in social networks and its implications for political violence

An ingenious study using the massive Weibo network revealed insights into the spread of certain emotions through social networks. Weibo is a social network platform not unlike Twitter. It is also hugely popular in China with millions of users making it an ideal platform for understanding how emotional states between socially-connected users correlate with each other. But the highest correlation by far was among angry users. Rui and co say anger strongly influences the neighbourhood in which it appears, spreading on average by about 3 hops or degrees.