# Anger is More Influential Than Joy: Sentiment Correlation in Weibo

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2402 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.2402/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Sep 2013.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [SentimentArcs: A Novel Method for Self-Supervised Sentiment Analysis of Time Series Shows SOTA Transformers Can Struggle Finding Narrative Arcs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09454/) (2021)
- [From Detection to Characterization: A Large-Scale Study of Ragebait on Japanese X](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02262/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years have witnessed the tremendous growth of the online social media. In China, Weibo, a Twitter-like service, has attracted more than 500 million users in less than four years. Connected by online social ties, different users influence each other emotionally. We find the correlation of anger among users is significantly higher than that of joy, which indicates that angry emotion could spread more quickly and broadly in the network. While the correlation of sadness is surprisingly low and highly fluctuated. Moreover, there is a stronger sentiment correlation between a pair of users if they share more interactions. And users with larger number of friends posses more significant sentiment influence to their neighborhoods. Our findings could provide insights for modeling sentiment influence and propagation in online social networks.