Web-based social networks have become popular as a medium for disseminating information and connecting like-minded people. The public accessibility of such networks with the ability to share opinions, thoughts, information, and experience offers great promise to enterprises and governments. In addition to individuals using such networks to connect to their friends and families, governments and enterprises have started exploiting these platforms for delivering their services to citizens and customers. However, the success of such attempts relies on the level of trust that members have with each other as well as with the service provider. Therefore, trust becomes an essential and important element of a successful social network. In this article, we present the first comprehensive review of social and computer science literature on trust in social networks. We first review the existing definitions of trust and define
social trust
in the context of social networks. We then discuss recent works addressing three aspects of social trust:
trust information collection
,
trust evaluation
, and
trust dissemination
. Finally, we compare and contrast the literature and identify areas for further research in social trust.
Research data on predisposition to mental health problems, and the fluctuations and regulation of emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are traditionally collected through surveys, which cannot provide a real-time insight into the emotional state of individuals or communities. Large datasets such as World Health Organization (WHO) statistics are collected less than once per year, whereas social network platforms, such as Twitter, offer the opportunity for real-time analysis of expressed mood. Such patterns are valuable to the mental health research community, to help understand the periods and locations of greatest demand and unmet need. We describe the "We Feel" system for analyzing global and regional variations in emotional expression, and report the results of validation against known patterns of variation in mood. 2.73 ×10(9) emotional tweets were collected over a 12-week period, and automatically annotated for emotion, geographic location, and gender. Principal component analysis (PCA) of the data illustrated a dominant in-phase pattern across all emotions, modulated by antiphase patterns for "positive" and "negative" emotions. The first three principal components accounted for over 90% of the variation in the data. PCA was also used to remove the dominant diurnal and weekly variations allowing identification of significant events within the data, with z-scores showing expression of emotions over 80 standard deviations from the mean. We also correlate emotional expression with WHO data at a national level and although no correlations were observed for the burden of depression, the burden of anxiety and suicide rates appeared to correlate with expression of particular emotions.
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