Phase Transition in Group Emotion

This article explores the formation and change of group emotion. The phase of group emotion is defined, and the phase transition of group emotion is studied from the following two aspects: the group with and without network structure (the group with coevolution between emotion and network structure). For the group without network structure, the threshold of group emotional phase transition is obtained, and the phenomenon of group emotional polarization is verified. For the group with co-evolution of emotion and network structure, node attractiveness is defined from three aspects: node emotional propensity, node aggregation degree, and node importance. The new network evolution model based on “node attractiveness” is constructed, and the degree distribution of the network is analyzed. The processes and conditions of phase transition in group emotion are obtained based on this evolutionary network analysis. The results show that there are three phases of group emotion: disorder phase, neutral phase, and extreme phase.