The role of information sentiment in popularity on social media: a psychoinformatic and electroencephalogram study

ABSTRACT

The effect of information sentiment on popularity is meaningful to understand the information content on social media. The present research examined whether emotion values of information could predict the potential of popularity in two psychoinformatic experiments. A prime task was used with popular/unpopular information as prime and high/low sentiment stimuli as targets. In Experiment 1, we observed that unpopular information survived better than popular information. In Experiment 2, the electrophysiological priming effect was observed for unpopular and popular information. According to the findings, sentiment of information on social media plays a key role in information popularity.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• psychoinformatics
• PAD
• popularity
• event-related potential

Acknowledgments

We are appreciated that suggestion provided by Yufeng Dong about drafted manuscript. We also thank Zhongju Liao for the discussion on experiment design. We thank Xiaoyu Xu, Jing Yang, Hai Liu for collecting data.

Author Contributions

YH developed the study concept. All authors contributed to the study design. Testing and data collection were performed by YH and YS. YH performed the data analysis under the supervision of XP, YM and QM. YH drafted the manuscript, and XP, YS, YM, QM provided critical revisions. LS provided help for the ERP study. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

Data Availability

All data in the manuscript are available when requested.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant [grant number 71702169, grant number 71471165]; Academy of Neuroeconomics and Neuromanagement at Ningbo University; National Students’ Platform for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Project under Grant [grant number 201810338055X]; the Alzheimer’s Research U.K. Senior Research Fellowship under Grant [grant number ARUK-SRF2017B-1]; and Philosophy and Social Science Planning Projects under Grant [grant number 14NDJC204YB].