Influence of Student Depression on the Spread of Public Opinion in University

Nie Min,Hu Xia,Guowu Yang,Luo Weimin,Yang Lei

doi:10.1155/2020/9378037

Abstract

In this study, we examined the impact of college students’ mental health on their social behavior. A social network was identified based on the behavior of college students sharing a meal. We analyzed the impact of depression on the structure of this network and found that students without obvious depressive symptoms, based on the test data of the SCL-90 Assessment Scale, were better at socializing than students with obvious depressive symptoms. We proposed a public opinion spreading model on social networks and formulated a heterogeneous mean-field theory to describe it. Further, using computer simulation experiments, we studied the impact of students’ mental health on the process of information propagation in college. The results of the experiments showed that students without obvious depressive symptoms were more likely to receive information than students with obvious depressive symptoms. Based on the results of our study, college psychological consultants can actively identify students who may be at risk of mental illness and give them attention and guidance.

Highlights

In the present self-media era, people can communicate online with friends through various platforms such as WeChat, QQ, Weibo, and BBS [1,2,3,4]
Various views and opinions held by disgruntled members of colleges and universities pass through these social platforms as public opinion and have a significantly negative impact on students. erefore, understanding the principles and mechanisms of public opinion dissemination in colleges and universities has become a focus of intensive research study. e core of these studies lay in analyzing information dissemination on social networks [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
To quantify the impact of college students’ mental health on their social relationships in school, we collected data from 4955 freshmen in a college, including the SCL-90 Assessment Scale of 20188 swipe-card data in October 21–31, 2018. e data used in the article, which could only be used for statistical analysis to obtain certain macrostatistical characteristics, were all processed through anonymization; it is impossible to identify specific students

Summary

Introduction

In the present self-media era, people can communicate online with friends through various platforms such as WeChat, QQ, Weibo, and BBS [1,2,3,4]. Various views and opinions held by disgruntled members of colleges and universities pass through these social platforms as public opinion and have a significantly negative impact on students. E core of these studies lay in analyzing information dissemination on social networks [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Online social networks often have characteristics such as small-world and scale-free properties and high clustering coefficient [13,14,15,16,17]. Zheng et al [27] proposed complex propagation dynamics based on multiple confirmations to characterize the information propagation process in social networks. In the dissemination of public opinion in colleges and universities, different students have different roles. We constructed a public opinion spreading model to determine whether students with apparent symptoms of depression influence the spread of public opinion in colleges and universities

Data Descriptions

Theoretical Analysis

Conclusions