2011/12/05 by Catherine A. Bliss, Bliss, Catherine A., Isabel M. Kloumann +7
Physics and Astronomy · Psychology · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Mental Health Research Topics #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1112.1010
openalex publication_date 2011/12/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The advent of social media has provided an extraordinary, if imperfect, 'big\ndata' window into the form and evolution of social networks. Based on nearly 40\nmillion message pairs posted to Twitter between September 2008 and February\n2009, we construct and examine the revealed social network structure and\ndynamics over the time scales of days, weeks, and months. At the level of user\nbehavior, we employ our recently developed hedonometric analysis methods to\ninvestigate patterns of sentiment expression. We find users' average happiness\nscores to be positively and significantly correlated with those of users one,\ntwo, and three links away. We strengthen our analysis by proposing and using a\nnull model to test the effect of network topology on the assortativity of\nhappiness. We also find evidence that more well connected users write happier\nstatus updates, with a transition occurring around Dunbar's number. More\ngenerally, our work provides evidence of a social sub-network structure within\nTwitter and raises several methodological points of interest with regard to\nsocial network reconstructions.\n