Modeling and Assessing the Temporal Behavior of Emotional and Depressive User Interactions on Social Networks

The way users interact on social media can indicate their well-being. When depressed, people’s feelings tend to be more evident, affecting how users interact and demonstrating their feelings on social media. This paper presents a new approach for the temporal assessment of emotional behavior and interaction among depressed users on social networks. We start by modeling user interactions using complex networks, grouping users through time using the Clauset-Newman-Moore greedy modularity maximization. We evaluate the built networks using metrics such as assortativity, density, clustering, diameter, and shortest path length, closeness, and coverage. Then, we propose EMUS, a method for establishing an emotional user score based on the extraction of emotional features in texts of posts and comments. To extract emotional features, we combine the use of the Empath framework and VADER lexicon. Finally, based on the standard deviation among users, we establish a metric for assessing mood levels. We evaluated users for 33 days, and the results show a sequence of mixed emotional behaviors with high correlations between the number of active users in the network communities, and the form and quality of interactions. The developed approach can be further applied to other database graphs, for different sequential pattern analysis and text-mining contexts.