On Sympathy and Symphony: Network-Oriented Modeling of the Adaptive Dynamics of Sympathy States

Abstract

Social network analysis commonly focuses on the relationships between two actors that could represent either individuals or populations. The present paper not only introduces a new concept of sympathy states to represent a sympathy between two actors but also models how different sympathy states affect each other in an adaptive manner taking into account who expresses the sympathy and who receives it. The designed network model was designed with the Eurovision Song Contest in mind and takes into account external political events that affect the scores in this contest over the years. The properties of the model were analyzed using social network analysis. The model represents a first attempt in modeling sympathy states and their adaptive dynamics modulated by external events by Network-Oriented Modeling based on adaptive temporal-causal networks.