Entrainment is one of the most pervasive phenomena. It refers to the interaction and consequent synchronization of two or more rhythmic processes. This principle has considerable impact on disciplines such as biology, collective behavior, sociology, and linguistics. In 2005, Philippe Rushton and Trudy Ann Bons published a paper in Psychological Science, and pointed out that "people long acquainted with each other tend to experience similar emotions". This contention suggests that human emotion also entrains through socialization, which is more significant in intimate relationships. Emotion entrainment performs many important social functions. For instance, emotion entrainment can help to detect the hidden communities in social networks. According to the affect theory of social exchange, emotions involved in social exchange impact actors’ collective behavior, and this effect is more significant for virtual communities. Therefore, the entrainment patterns of emotions may reflect more accurate social ties, which contribute to the identification of latent communities in multi-role networks. Also, emotion entrainment provides implications for the reconstruction of hierarchical social structures. Power and social status are subtly reflected by people's entrainment patterns. Thus, social structure can be readily rebuilt via stratifying the entrainment patterns. Moreover, emotion entrainment benefits decision-making in word-of-mouth marketing. Supervising and analyzing the negative comments and critics in social networks promotes a nuanced understanding of key factors that drive the evolution of negative emotions. If appropriate public relation ploys are adopted, the striking convergences of massive negative emotions could be avoided, thus minimizing the potential costs pertaining to enterprise's commerce and reputation. Despite its importance, the principles of emotion entrainment, to date, are still poorly understood. Most of the existing work merely inquires entrainment phenomenon by applying heuristic methods on small scale or controlled laboratory experiments. How collective emotion entrains in a large-scale, real world data setting is yet to be explored. Recently, the proliferation of various online social media platforms has not only provided entrainment investigation with huge amount of datasets, but also challenged traditional approaches in modeling and analysis. As such,this dissertation has reported studies on emotion entrainment in the con...
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