Control Strategies for Crowd Emotional Contagion Coupling the Virtual and Physical Cyberspace in Emergencies

Crowd emotional contagion occurs in both virtual and physical cyberspace at the same time. To realistically simulate the process of crowd emotional contagion, the influences of virtual cyberspace and physical cyberspace should be considered comprehensively. In addition, control strategies significantly affect the speed and scale of emotional contagion in a crowd. However, control strategies described by existing studies are inaccurate since few of them consider both physical and virtual cyberspace to jointly study the influence of control strategies on crowd emotional contagion. To achieve more accurate control, we first establish a novel personalized emotional contagion computational (NP-ECC) model to study control strategies of crowd emotional contagion coupling the physical and virtual cyberspace. Second, we construct a personalized BA scale-free network to calculate the phase transition threshold of the proposed NP-ECC model more accurately. Finally, we propose two algorithms, control strategies-BA (CS-BA) and threshold-BA (T-BA), to verify the stability of the NP-ECC model and the accuracy of the phase transition threshold, respectively. The experimental results show that our method can better control the speed and scale of crowd emotional contagion and thus can provide guidance for a large-scale crowd evacuation.