The impact of individual emotions and 2-simplex states on the spread of epidemics in multilayer networks

Abstract

In recent years, the interaction between information diffusion and epidemic spreading in higher-order networks has been a hot research topic. Previous study has revealed that individual emotions played a significant role in epidemic spreading, which deserves further study in multilayer networks with higher-order interactions. Thus, this paper proposes a two-layer network model that considers the effect of both individual emotions and 2-simplex states. In the virtual layer, information diffusion is affected by the state of 2-simplex and individual's emotion state simultaneously. Meanwhile, epidemic spreading occurs in the physical layer through pairwise interactions. Theoretical analysis based on Micro-Markov Chain Approach (MMCA) and numerical simulations based on Monte-Carlo (MC) method are performed. Our findings demonstrate that individual emotions can inhibit the spread of epidemics and 2-simplex states indirectly influence epidemic spreading through controlling the additional information transmission capacity in the upper layer.