Structural Similarities of Emotion-exchange Networks: Evidence from 18 Crisis Events

: Online social networks (OSNs) play a significant role during crisis events by offering a convenient channel for information seeking, social bonding, and opinion sharing. In this context, people express their fear, panic, shock, as well as gratitude, well-wishing, and empathy as a crisis event evolves over time. Though emotional responses during crisis events have been studied both in offline and online settings, it is yet unclear which communication structures are representative for the exchange of specific types of emotions. In this paper, we report on new findings which indicate that not all negative emotions are exchanged in the same way. In particular, we used emotion-exchange motifs to compare the structure of emotion-annotated communication networks that resulted from 18 crisis events. Our findings clearly indicate that 1) exchanges of sadness on the one hand, and joy / love on the other show more structural similarity than any other pair of emotions, 2) emotion-exchange networks can be clustered into two families, each of which includes different types of emotions, 3) membership in the two families of emotion-exchange networks fluctuates over time. A related data-set is available for download from IEEE DataPort, DOI: 10.21227/yajb-6y77.