Social II

Understanding the perceptions of people who commit suicide is a sensitive and crucial scientific challenge. There are circumstances where people feel the need to leave something written, a note where they express and register their last thoughts. Our work investigates 139 genuine suicide notes, reconstructing the cognitive and emotional states of people who committed suicide. Our cognitive network approach enables a quantitative analysis of the language of suicide notes through structural balance theory, semantic frame theory and emotional profiling.

I propose a social structure theory that challenges the widely accepted role of preferential attachment and triadic closure as primary mechanisms of network formation. For that, I build upon Feld's concepts on social circles, Breiger's on the duality of actors and groups, and Hinde's on interactions and relationships. The theory emphasizes that ties between actors stem from social circles in which they participate; a notion straightforwardly modeled through two-mode and projected networks.

The understanding of cooperative behavior in social systems has been the subject of intense research over the past few decades. In this regard, the theoretical models used to explain cooperation in human societies have been complemented with a growing interest in experimental studies to validate the proposed mechanisms. In this work, we rely on previous experimental findings to build a theoretical model based on two cooperation driving mechanisms: second-order reputation and memory.

Since the first agent-based models (ABM), the scientific community has been interested in making not only the results of computational models understandable but also the modeling description, to facilitate their replication. The form that has been adopted to a greater extent has been the ODD (Overview, Design concepts, and Details) protocol, which provides a generic structure for its documentation. This protocol provides a way to clearly explain the procedures and interactions of the complex systems to be analyzed, with applications that have spread across different disciplines.