Ego-Centric Analysis of Supportive Networks.

The way we think about ourselves has a direct influence on our emotional state and our mood. Consequently by changing the way we think we can positively influence our mood and how we respond to situations. Many studies have shown a robust relationship in which emotional support from others positively affects how we think about ourselves. Emotional support can come from many sources, such as family, friends, neighbors, and more recently we have seen the emergence of emotional support networks. In such networks users share their moods and receive emotional support from others, and the objective is to nurture supportive relationships and build a social support network. In this paper we present an ego-centric study of supportive networks to show how user mood evolves as the user ego-network is expanded. We considered different types of ego-networks induced by gender and psychological disorders. We found that the way user mood evolves strongly depends on the type of connections that are created. The behavior of users that show mood improvement is very distinct from the behavior of users that do not show mood improvement.