Colexification Networks Encode Affective Meaning

 Anna Di Natale, Max Pellert, David Garcia Affective Science (2021) Colexification is a linguistic phenomenon that occurs when multiple concepts are expressed in a language with the same word. Colexification patterns are frequently used to estimate the meaning similarity between words, but the hypothesis that these are related is still missing direct empirical validation at …

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A Weighted Balance Model of Opinion Hyperpolarization

 Simon Schweighofer, Frank Schweitzer, David Garcia Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 23 (3) 5 (2020) Polarization is threatening the stability of democratic societies. Until now, polarization research has focused on opinion extremeness, overlooking the correlation between different policy issues. In this paper, we explain the emergence of hyperpolarization, i.e., the combination of extremeness and …

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Collective Emotions and Social Resilience in the Digital Traces After a Terrorist Attack

David Garcia, Bernard Rimé Psychological Science, 30(4), 2019 After collective traumas such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks, members of concerned communities experience intense emotions and talk profusely about them. Although these exchanges resemble simple emotional venting, Durkheim’s theory of collective effervescence postulates that these collective emotions lead to higher levels of solidarity in the …

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Collective aspects of privacy in the Twitter social network

 David Garcia, Mansi Goel, Amod Agrawal, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru EPJ Data Science 7:3 Preserving individual control over private information is one of the rising concerns in our digital society. Online social networks exist in application ecosystems that allow them to access data from other services, for example gathering contact lists through mobile phone applications. Such data …

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Leaking Privacy and Shadow Profiles in Online Social Networks

 David Garcia Science Advances; 3:e1701172 Social interaction and data integration in the digital society can affect the control that individuals have on their privacy. Social networking sites can access data from other services, including user contact lists where nonusers are listed too. Although most research on online privacy has focused on the inference of personal …

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Understanding Popularity, Reputation, and Social Influence in the Twitter Society

 David Garcia, Pavlin Mavrodiev, Daniele Casati, Frank Schweitzer Policy & Internet, 9 (3) The pervasive presence of online media in our society has transferred a significant part of political deliberation to online forums and social networking sites. This article examines popularity, reputation, and social influence on Twitter using large-scale digital traces from 2009 to 2016. …

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The Dynamics of Emotions in Online Interaction

David Garcia, Arvid Kappas, Dennis Küster, and Frank Schweitzer Royal Society Open Science, 3 160059 (2016) We study the changes in emotional states induced by reading and participating in online discussions, empirically testing a computational model of online emotional interaction. Using principles of dynamical systems, we quantify changes in valence and arousal through subjective reports, …

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The QWERTY Effect on the Web

How Typing shapes the meaning of words in human-computer interaction David García and Markus Strohmaier Proceedings of the 25th international World Wide Web conference (WWW) The QWERTY effect postulates that the keyboard layout influences word meanings by linking positivity to the use of the right hand and negativity to the use of the left hand. …

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