The rippling dynamics of valenced messages in naturalistic youth chat

Abstract

Even though human behavior is largely driven by real-time feedback from others, this social complexity is underrepresented in psychological theory, largely because it is so difficult to isolate. In this work, we performed a quasi-experimental analysis of hundreds of millions of chat room messages between young people. This allowed us to reconstruct how-and on what timelinethe valence of one message affects the valence of subsequent messages by others. For the highly emotionally valenced chat messages that we focused on, we found that these messages elicited a general increase of 0.1 to 0.4 messages per minute. This influence started 2 s after the original message and continued out to 60 s. Expanding our focus to include feedback loops-the way a speaker's chat comes back to affect him or her-we found that the stimulating effects of these same chat events started rippling back from others 8 s after the original message, to cause an increase in the speaker's chat that persisted for up to 8 min. This feedback accounted for at least 1% of the bulk of chat. Additionally, a message's valence affects its dynamics, with negative events feeding back more slowly and continuing to affect the speaker longer. By reconstructing the second-by-second dynamics of many psychosocial processes in aggregate, we captured the timescales at which they collectively ripple through a social system to drive system-level outcomes. KeywordsElectronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.

#lockdown: Network-Enhanced Emotional Profiling in the Time of COVID-19

“…Emotions elicited by ideas can influence users' behaviour without their awareness, resulting in the emergence of specific behavioural patterns such as implicit biases [24]. Unlike pathogen transmission, no direct contact is necessary for cognitive and emotional contagion to take place, since both are driven by information processing and diffusion, like it happens through social media [27,28]. In particular, during large-scale events, ripples of emotions can rapidly spread across information systems [28] and have dramatic effects, as it has recently been demonstrated in elections and social movements [12,26,29].…”

#lockdown: network-enhanced emotional profiling at the times of COVID-19

“…Emotions elicited by ideas can influence users' behaviour without their awareness, resulting in the emergence of specific behavioural patterns such as implicit biases [23]. Unlike pathogen transmission, no direct contact is necessary for cognitive and emotional contagion to take place, since both are driven by information processing and diffusion, like it happens through social media [26,27]. In particular, during large-scale events, ripples of emotions can rapidly spread across information systems [27] and have dramatic effects, as it has recently been demonstrated in elections and social movements [28,12,25].…”

Spillover Effects When Taking Turns in Dyadic Coping: How Lingering Negative Affect and Perceived Partner Responsiveness Shape Subsequent Support Provision

“…We examined how experiences of one dyadic coping interaction may spill over to a second dyadic coping interaction by letting partners switch roles as sharer and support provider. In real life, however, these interpersonal dynamics are more complex and involve continuous waves of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes that overlap and interact (Butler and Randall, 2013;Frey et al, 2019). Furthermore, these processes may play out over various time spans including temporally fine-grained dynamics within one conversation (see Frey et al, 2019) but also extended periods that constitute the relational context (see Boiger and Mesquita, 2012).…”

“…In real life, however, these interpersonal dynamics are more complex and involve continuous waves of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes that overlap and interact (Butler and Randall, 2013;Frey et al, 2019). Furthermore, these processes may play out over various time spans including temporally fine-grained dynamics within one conversation (see Frey et al, 2019) but also extended periods that constitute the relational context (see Boiger and Mesquita, 2012). Particularly, potential spillover effects of perceived partner responsiveness form a clear example of how these effects may shape both temporary and more chronic motivations to be a supportive partner.…”