Emotional patterns on social media connect to users and their networks
Interplay between Emotional Dynamics and Network Structure on the Social Media Vent
Social and Information Networks
Summary
This study looks at how people’s emotions on a social media app called Vent, where users tag their posts with emotions, are influenced by the emotions they recently saw and expressed. They found that people tend to post emotions similar to what they experienced in the minutes before posting, but some emotions also often follow different ones, like surprise before fear. The study also shows that users whose emotions sync closely with their timelines tend to be connected in the social network. This helps understand how emotions spread and link to social connections online.
What this means in practice
- •For social media platform designers: Improve emotional content recommendation by using users’ recent emotional history and network position to tailor what is shown.
- •For mental health app developers: Design tools that monitor emotional shifts in users’ posts over time to offer timely supportive interventions.
Authors
Yuina Takahashi, Sho Tsugawa
Abstract
The sharing and contagion of emotions on social media influence online interactions and users' psychological states. This study analyzes emotional dynamics on Vent, an emotion-sharing social media platform where users explicitly assign emotional labels to their own posts. Using a large-scale dataset, we examine how emotions in users' pre-posting timelines are associated with their subsequent emotional labels and how such associations vary across users. Our analysis reveals three key findings. First, users' subsequent emotional labels are associated with the emotional composition of their pre-posting timelines, with same-category emotions being overrepresented before posts in all analyzed categories. Second, several cross-category associations are observed; for example, Surprise was overrepresented before Fear posts; Affection and Happiness were overrepresented before Anger posts; and Affection was overrepresented before Sadness posts. Third, users differ in their degree of alignment with timeline emotional fluctuations, and highly aligned users tend to be located close to one another in the network. These findings provide large-scale observational evidence that emotional expression on Vent is associated with both short-term timeline context and network structure.