Studying the impact of individual emotional states on the co-evolution of information, behavior and disease in multiplex networks

As the information technology era advances, information is rapidly disseminated, and it directly influence individuals’ behavioral choices, which will also have a significant impact on disease transmission, and the individual emotional states play a crucial role in this process. This paper proposes a new coupled model, aiming to investigate the co-evolutionary interactions of individual emotional states with information, behavior and disease transmission. Meanwhile, it innovatively introduces a threshold model, to quantify the process of individual emotional state change. The model considers that individuals’ emotional states are influenced by two main factors: the global information dissemination and the local disease severity. It also analyzes in depth how the individual emotional state affects the individual’s willingness to receive information, willingness to vaccinate, and susceptibility, which are important factors in the disease transmission process. The model is analyzed utilizing the MMCA (Microscopic Markov Chain Approach), aiming to obtain state transformation equation and derive the disease outbreak thresholds. Simulation experiments show that individual emotions tend to have a complex impact on the model transmission process. Overall, during disease transmission, individuals should appropriately regulate their emotional changes, make more positive and rational decisions, while effectively controlling the negative information dissemination, which is of vital importance for the maintenance of public health and social stability.