Social Emotional Stability Facing Disaster Warning

Social emotion is a complex system, with a dissipative structure. When the carriers of social emotion percept threaten from a disaster warning, the initiative dissipative structure of social emotional system will be broken down. This study presents the evaluation methods of social emotional stability under disaster warning from the aspect of a complex system. Firstly, we analyzed the dissipative structure features of social emotion and used Social Emotional Entropy (SEE) to measure the changes of social emotional stability, which was explained by the example of the Bird Flu H7N9 events in 2013. Secondly, we considered that social emotion is not simply the totaling of individuals’ emotions, but results from both the combination of individual-level affective factors as well as from the group or contextual level. In that way, we used the Cellular Automaton modeling method integrated with the Social Network Theory, in order to present a dynamic dispersal process of SEE from both aspects: “bottom-up” and “top-down”. Finally, we used a case study to verify the effectiveness of the integrated method. Our results indicated that the social network properties and population characteristics are key determining variables of social emotional stability.