Modeling Network Public Opinion Propagation with the Consideration of Individual Emotions

Peihua Fu, Bailu Jing, Tinggui Chen, Jianjun Yang and Guodong Cong
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Peihua Fu: School of Management and E-Business, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou 310018, China
Bailu Jing: School of Management and E-Business, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou 310018, China
Tinggui Chen: School of Statistics and Mathematics, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou 310018, China
Jianjun Yang: Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of North Georgia, Oakwood, GA 30566, USA
Guodong Cong: School of Tourism and Urban-Rural Planning, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou 310018, China

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 18, 1-29

Abstract: The occurrence of popular social events causes fluctuations and changes of public emotions, while the rapid development of online social platforms and networks has made individual interactions more intense and further escalated public emotions into public opinion. However, there is a lack of consideration of individual emotions in the current research on online public opinion. Based on this, this paper firstly expounds the quantitative representation of attitude and emotion, analyzes the formation and propagation process of online public opinion by combining individual’s expression willingness, individual’s expression ability, attitude perception value, attitude change probability and other factors, and constructs a network public opinion propagation model that takes individual emotion into consideration. Finally, the main factors affecting the formation and propagation of network public opinion are discussed through simulation experiments. The results demonstrate that: (1) fear is conducive to the formation of online public opinion, but the speed is relatively slow; sadness is not conducive to the formation, but once enough people participate in the exchange of views, the formation of online public opinion will be faster; (2) the influence of online public opinion on individual emotions expands with the increase of the number of individual interactions; (3) different network structures impact differently on the propagation of public opinion. Among them, BA (BA network is a scale-free network model proposed by Barabasi and Albert in order to explain the generation mechanism of power law, BA model has two characteristics: growth and priority connection mechanism) and ER (ER network is a network with random connectivity proposed by Erdös-Renyi) random networks can promote the propagation of online public opinion, which is prone to “one-sided” online public opinion. WS small-world networks (proposed by Watts and Strogatz. It is a kind of network with short average path length and high clustering coefficient) and fully-connected networks have an inhibitory effect on the spread of online public opinion, easily maintaining the multi-dimensional nature of online public opinion.

Keywords: individual emotion; online public opinion; public opinion propagation; viewpoint interaction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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