Social Influence (Oct 2019)

The role of information sentiment in popularity on social media: a psychoinformatic and electroencephalogram study

  • Yujing Huang,
  • Xuwei Pan,
  • Li Su,
  • Yang Sun,
  • Yan Mo,
  • Qingguo Ma

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2019.1695658
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 3-4
pp. 133 – 146

Abstract

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The effect of information sentiment on popularity is meaningful to understand the information content on social media. The present research examined whether emotion values of information could predict the potential of popularity in two psychoinformatic experiments. A prime task was used with popular/unpopular information as prime and high/low sentiment stimuli as targets. In Experiment 1, we observed that unpopular information survived better than popular information. In Experiment 2, the electrophysiological priming effect was observed for unpopular and popular information. According to the findings, sentiment of information on social media plays a key role in information popularity.

Keywords