Finding N users with most happiness influences on online social networks

Abstract

In the real world, emotions guide people's thoughts and influence their life behaviors, and emotions can be affected by interpersonal interactions. Following the increased popularity of the internet, more and more people are using online social networks, and recent research has found that online users have real-world emotional contagion behaviors. However, most previous studies were based mainly on text analysis and few have analyzed single emotions. Therefore, in this paper, we take Facebook as the study object, and we analyze the influences of interactive behaviors, such as the number of 'likes' a post receives, the number of times a post is shared, the number of followers, and the number of comments on a post, on the user's state of happiness. We thus establish which kinds of online users possess the most influencing state of happiness. The experimental results show that the number of times a post is shared is the best indicator of online users possessing the most influencing state of happiness.