Emotional Contagion in the Online Depression Community

Tang, Jingyun; Yu, Guang; Yao, Xiaoxu

doi:10.3390/healthcare9121609

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 58 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…They may not directly express their suicidal thoughts to friends or families because of an array of reasons, so social media may become the vent. Our findings on the correlation between Twitter-identified suicide risk and actual suicide behaviors indicate the potential existence of negative emotional contagion (people emotionally affect surrounding ones) in local or web-based communities, as observed in previous studies [26,27]. Our study supplements another layer that suggests that emotion contagion may transmit from web-based to offline space.…”

Section: Comparison With Prior Worksupporting

confidence: 85%

Public Surveillance of Social Media for Suicide Using Advanced Deep Learning Models in Japan: Time Series Study From 2012 to 2022

Wang¹,

Ning²,

Huang³

et al. 2023

J Med Internet Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Background Social media platforms have been increasingly used to express suicidal thoughts, feelings, and acts, raising public concerns over time. A large body of literature has explored the suicide risks identified by people’s expressions on social media. However, there is not enough evidence to conclude that social media provides public surveillance for suicide without aligning suicide risks detected on social media with actual suicidal behaviors. Corroborating this alignment is a crucial foundation for suicide prevention and intervention through social media and for estimating and predicting suicide in countries with no reliable suicide statistics. Objective This study aimed to corroborate whether the suicide risks identified on social media align with actual suicidal behaviors. This aim was achieved by tracking suicide risks detected by 62 million tweets posted in Japan over a 10-year period and assessing the locational and temporal alignment of such suicide risks with actual suicide behaviors recorded in national suicide statistics. Methods This study used a human-in-the-loop approach to identify suicide-risk tweets posted in Japan from January 2013 to December 2022. This approach involved keyword-filtered data mining, data scanning by human efforts, and data refinement via an advanced natural language processing model termed Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. The tweet-identified suicide risks were then compared with actual suicide records in both temporal and spatial dimensions to validate if they were statistically correlated. Results Twitter-identified suicide risks and actual suicide records were temporally correlated by month in the 10 years from 2013 to 2022 (correlation coefficient=0.533; P<.001); this correlation coefficient is higher at 0.652 when we advanced the Twitter-identified suicide risks 1 month earlier to compare with the actual suicide records. These 2 indicators were also spatially correlated by city with a correlation coefficient of 0.699 (P<.001) for the 10-year period. Among the 267 cities with the top quintile of suicide risks identified from both tweets and actual suicide records, 73.5% (n=196) of cities overlapped. In addition, Twitter-identified suicide risks were at a relatively lower level after midnight compared to a higher level in the afternoon, as well as a higher level on Sundays and Saturdays compared to weekdays. Conclusions Social media platforms provide an anonymous space where people express their suicidal thoughts, ideation, and acts. Such expressions can serve as an alternative source to estimating and predicting suicide in countries without reliable suicide statistics. It can also provide real-time tracking of suicide risks, serving as an early warning for suicide. The identification of areas where suicide risks are highly concentrated is crucial for location-based mental health planning, enabling suicide prevention and intervention through social media in a spatially and temporally explicit manner.

show abstract

Section: Comparison With Prior Worksupporting

confidence: 85%

Public Surveillance of Social Media for Suicide Using Advanced Deep Learning Models in Japan: Time Series Study From 2012 to 2022

Wang¹,

Ning²,

Huang³

et al. 2023

J Med Internet Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Furthermore, there are studies that contradict the possibility that mental health problems and happiness can be socially contagious to an appreciable extent [ 6 ]. Despite this, there is no doubt that social media and social networks play a role in the diffusion and amplification of certain behaviors, which is related to social contagion [ 7 , 8 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social contagion, violence, and suicide among adolescents

Martínez

Jiménez-Molina

Gerber

2023

Current Opinion in Psychiatry

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Purpose of reviewSocial Contagion is defined as the spread of behaviors, attitudes, and affect through crowds and other types of social aggregates from one member to another. Adolescents are prone to social contagion because they may be especially susceptible to peer influence and social media.In this article, we provide a brief review of the most recent findings on social contagion, violence, and suicide among adolescents.Recent findingsRecent evidence support social contagion in gun violence, bullying, cyberbullying, violent offending, and suicide, but is inconclusive on the role of violent video game exposure on aggressive behavior.SummaryThe mechanisms underlying the contagion effect of violence and suicide are currently unclear. It has been argued that social learning, identification with significant others, and the normalization of specific norms play a role. All these mechanisms require understanding social contagion as a complex interaction between individual, relational and social factors. This is key if the social contagion perspective is to be used not only to investigate negative outcomes, but also as a framework for promoting prosocial attitudes and behaviors. Additionally, more research is needed on psychosocial interventions and public policies to minimize the potential spillover effect of violence and suicide.

show abstract

“…According to this finding, negative emotions are faster to spread, and participants with higher activity being the most susceptible (Tang et al, 2021). I will attempt in this paper to place the perception of activities and the expression of the disorders on social media platforms outside of emotional contagion to gain a more sophisticated understanding of the expression of the disorders.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotional Contagion on Social Media Platforms: New Directions in Cognitive Science and Practice

Bamijoko-Okungbaye

2022

JSMI

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Social media platforms have been hypothesised to be a source of mental disorders to develop, and emotional contagion has been described as a precursor of these disorders. This paper systematically explores the key features of emotional contagion as a psychophysiological and behavioural experience required for the conversion of these disorders to propose an innovative characterisation of mental disorders on digital platforms as socially construed and value-laden phenomena.

show abstract

Emotional Contagion in the Online Depression Community

Cited by 12 publications

References 58 publications

Public Surveillance of Social Media for Suicide Using Advanced Deep Learning Models in Japan: Time Series Study From 2012 to 2022

Public Surveillance of Social Media for Suicide Using Advanced Deep Learning Models in Japan: Time Series Study From 2012 to 2022

Social contagion, violence, and suicide among adolescents

Emotional Contagion on Social Media Platforms: New Directions in Cognitive Science and Practice

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About