Schweitzer, Frank, and David Garcia. "An agent-based model of collective emotions in online communities." The European Physical Journal B 77 (2010): 533-545.

This paper introduces an agent-based framework designed to simulate the emergence of collective emotions within online communities. By modeling individual agents' emotions through valence and arousal—using Brownian agents and stochastic dynamics—it incorporates the influence of online communication on these emotional states. Emotional information generated by agents is stored and spread through a virtual field representing the online medium, impacting agents' emotions in complex ways. The research identifies conditions under which collective emotions manifest, evident in a bimodal valence distribution, and distinguishes scenarios for single or repeated occurrences of collective emotions based on the interaction between the information field and agents' arousal. The theoretical findings are supported by agent-based computer simulations, offering hypotheses on the emergence of collective emotions that can be tested against real-world online community data.