Social Sensing and Behavioral Analytics for Digital Resilience

Research at a Glance

Topic	Data and Methods	Main Finding	Key Papers
Behavior cocoon and daily activity structure	UK Time Use Survey, panel-style temporal analysis, behavioral diversity metrics	Digital media use for work and leisure shows different associations with cocoon formation; work-life balance moderates the pattern.	(Yan et al., 2025)
Emotion dynamics in crisis communication	Four-wave social media panel data, fixed-effects modeling	Negative and positive emotion show nonlinear relationships with online donation; panic and sympathy discourse act as moderators.	(Zhang et al., 2025)
Partisan exposure and conspiracy beliefs	US survey data, regression with interaction analysis	Exposure to conservative media and far-right sites is associated with stronger COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, with political-identity heterogeneity.	(Yu et al., 2024)
Authoritarian personality and policy attitudes	ANES 2020 data, mediation analysis	Authoritarian personality has an indirect pathway to gun-control attitudes through partisan media exposure.	(Jiang et al., 2025)
Collective attention foundations	Computational communication modeling	Early work on collective attention flow informs current social-sensing and exposure-pathway measurement.	(Wang et al., 2017)

Methods Stack

Category	Methods
Inference	Fixed-effects and multilevel models, mediation designs
Computation	Social sensing pipelines, NLP-based emotion and discourse measurement
Data	Time-use surveys, social media panel data, national survey datasets

Program Direction

Build policy-relevant computational evidence on platform effects and information vulnerability.
Publish reusable methods in computing venues and domain findings in high-impact interdisciplinary outlets.
Train PhD students on end-to-end social sensing workflows and causal inference in observational settings.

References

2025

Commun.

Who Weaved My Behavior Cocoon? The Impact of ICT Use on Daily Behaviors in an Accelerated Society

X. F. Yan, Zhicong Chen, L. Lu, and 1 more author

Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research, 2025

DOI Bib

@article{yan2025cocoon,
  title = {Who Weaved My Behavior Cocoon? The Impact of {ICT} Use on Daily Behaviors in an Accelerated Society},
  author = {Yan, X. F. and Chen, Zhicong and Lu, L. and Wang, C. J.},
  journal = {Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1515/commun-2024-0160},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2024-0160},
}

IJBC

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair: The role of emotion, panic, and sympathy discourses in promoting productive actions

Y. Zhang, Y. Sun, G. Lu, and 2 more authors

International Journal of Business Communication, 2025

DOI Bib

@article{zhang2025emotion,
  title = {Let us not wallow in the valley of despair: The role of emotion, panic, and sympathy discourses in promoting productive actions},
  author = {Zhang, Y. and Sun, Y. and Lu, G. and Chen, Zhicong and Wang, C. J.},
  journal = {International Journal of Business Communication},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1177/23294884251333665},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1177/23294884251333665},
}

JITP

Exploring the Mediating Role of Selective Exposure to Partisan Media Between the Authoritarian Personality and Gun Control Attitudes

X. Jiang, H. Miao, and Zhicong Chen

Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2025

DOI Bib

@article{jiang2025authoritarian,
  title = {Exploring the Mediating Role of Selective Exposure to Partisan Media Between the Authoritarian Personality and Gun Control Attitudes},
  author = {Jiang, X. and Miao, H. and Chen, Zhicong},
  journal = {Journal of Information Technology \& Politics},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1080/19331681.2025.2541275},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2025.2541275},
}

2024

Sage Open

Propagating COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories: The Influence of Right-Wing Sources

W. Yu, Zhicong Chen, X. Meng, and 1 more author

Sage Open, 2024

DOI Bib

@article{yu2024conspiracy,
  title = {Propagating {COVID}-19 Conspiracy Theories: The Influence of Right-Wing Sources},
  author = {Yu, W. and Chen, Zhicong and Meng, X. and Yan, Q.},
  journal = {Sage Open},
  volume = {14},
  number = {2},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1177/21582440241258026},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440241258026},
}

2017

arXiv

Leveraging the Flow of Collective Attention for Computational Communication Research

C. J. Wang, Zhicong Chen, Q. Qin, and 1 more author

arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.07761, 2017

DOI Bib

@article{wang2017collectiveattention,
  title = {Leveraging the Flow of Collective Attention for Computational Communication Research},
  author = {Wang, C. J. and Chen, Zhicong and Qin, Q. and Chao, N.},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.07761},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.1710.07761},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07761}
}