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Collective emotions online and their influence on community life.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: E-communities, social groups interacting online, have recently become an object of interdisciplinary research. As with face-to-face meetings, Internet exchanges may not only include factual information but also emotional information--how participants feel about the subject discussed or other group members. Emotions in turn are known to be important in affecting interaction partners in offline communication in many ways. Could emotions in Internet exchanges affect others and systematically influence quantitative and qualitative aspects of the trajectory of e-communities? The development of automatic sentiment analysis has made large scale emotion detection and analysis possible using text messages collected from the web. However, it is not clear if emotions in e-communities primarily derive from individual group members' personalities or if they result from intra-group interactions, and whether they influence group activities. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here, for the first time, we show the collective character of affective phenomena on a large scale as observed in four million posts downloaded from Blogs, Digg and BBC forums. To test whether the emotions of a community member may influence the emotions of others, posts were grouped into clusters of messages with similar emotional valences. The frequency of long clusters was much higher than it would be if emotions occurred at random. Distributions for cluster lengths can be explained by preferential processes because conditional probabilities for consecutive messages grow as a power law with cluster length. For BBC forum threads, average discussion lengths were higher for larger values of absolute average emotional valence in the first ten comments and the average amount of emotion in messages fell during discussions. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Overall, our results prove that collective emotional states can be created and modulated via Internet communication and that emotional expressiveness is the fuel that sustains some e-communities.

SUBMITTER: Chmiel A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3144870 | biostudies-literature | 2011

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Collective emotions online and their influence on community life.

Chmiel Anna A Sienkiewicz Julian J Thelwall Mike M Paltoglou Georgios G Buckley Kevan K Kappas Arvid A Hołyst Janusz A JA

PloS one 20110727 7

<h4>Background</h4>E-communities, social groups interacting online, have recently become an object of interdisciplinary research. As with face-to-face meetings, Internet exchanges may not only include factual information but also emotional information--how participants feel about the subject discussed or other group members. Emotions in turn are known to be important in affecting interaction partners in offline communication in many ways. Could emotions in Internet exchanges affect others and sy ...[more]

PMID: 21818302

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Project description:BackgroundOnline communities for patients with chronic conditions are becoming healthcare providers. They gather to offer support and services, and to become a collective oppositional force. We found, however, that these communities and their collective power are rarely studied in the health services management literature, which focuses more on the empowering practices of healthcare professionals or patient participation. The aim of this study is thus to build a better understanding of the nature of patients' collective empowerment and the processes underlying it. We carry out two exploratory qualitative studies to examine the motivations that drive chronically ill patients to engage in an individual and then collective empowerment process.MethodsThe first qualitative study involves four semi-structured interviews with experts. The second is a netnographic study carried out over a year on an online forum for people with thyroid disease. The latter has two phases: an immersion phase followed by one that traces the path of 21 forum members from their first message to their recognition as active members or even forum moderators. The data are analyzed through thematic and lexical content analyses.ResultsWe were able to identify the different stages of the collective patient empowerment process and the criteria for progression though this process. Specifically, the first study sheds light on the unmet individual and collective needs of the patients. The second emphasizes the essential role of active contributors and their impact on the growth and power of the community.ConclusionsThis study looks at patient communities as a self-contained system and identifies the stages of collective empowerment that match the organization's declared priorities: community, collaborative, productive, and societal. These results should help health professionals better take these online communities into account in patient care, improving their practices, and carrying out their policies. We call for future research into collective empowerment and its influence on patient behavior, the transformation of healthcare institutions, and the health services market.

Dataset Information

Collective emotions online and their influence on community life.

Publications

Collective emotions online and their influence on community life.

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