One well-known feature of social networks is that similar people tend to attract each other: birds of a feather flock together.
The results clearly show that anger is more influential than other emotions such as joy or sadness, a finding that could have significant implications for our understanding of the way information spreads through social networks.
During six months in 2010, the group collected some 70 million tweets from 200,000 users and constructed a social network in which users are linked if they mutually interact by sending messages to each other or retweeting each other, for example.
They divided these into four categories, expressing joy, sadness, anger or disgust.
Finally, the group studied the way sentiments spread through the network. For example, if one person sent an angry tweet, how likely was it that a recipient would also send an angry message, and how likely was it that the recipient of this message would pass on the same sentiment, and so on?
Sadness and disgust do not easily spread through the network in this way.
It was found a higher correlation among users who tweeted joyful messages.
But the highest correlation by far was among angry users. Rui said anger strongly influences the neighborhood in which it appears, spreading on average by about three degrees. “Anger has a surprisingly higher correlation than other emotions,” the researchers said.
The first is conflicts between China and foreign countries, such as the military activities of the U.S. and South Korea in the Yellow Sea and a collision in September 2010 between a Chinese and Japanese ship.
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