Emotions, positive and negative, turn out to be contagious when shared with your friends and connections on social networking websites. Researchers analyzed more than a billion posts on Facebook and discovered that moods spread like a disease to the people you have contact with, just like in real life.
It’s a well-known fact that emotions, including happiness, spread among people when they are in direct contact. When you are smiling, people around you start feeling better, too, and when you are sad, the others tend to sympathize and feel sadness, as well.
However, this phenomenon is obviously valid for the virtual world too, at least according to science. A team of researchers, lead by James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California in San Diego, looked at the emotional aspect of over a billion anonymous Facebook status updates in English, posted from January 2009 until March 2012. They used a computer program to track emotions and test if they would spread from one person to another, without even looking at the emotions themselves. The researchers focused on what reaction a simple thing like rain could cause.
They tracked how updates changed when it rained. Surprisingly, rain influenced people’s moods – negative posts increased by 1.16%, while the positive ones fell by 1.19%. The essential part of the analysis is the fact, that people who posted those statuses were not living in cities where it rained. Rather the friends, connected with them, lived in locations where it rained. This means that the negative mood is not caused by the fact that it’s raining outside. Your bad mood is simply a result of your friends’ bad mood! So, emotions expressed in social networks, not only photos of cute cats and inspirational statuses really have a domino effect. The researchers also found that every negative post triggered 1.29 more negative posts than what’s usual, while every happy post was responsible for an extra 1.75 positive status updates.
The results of the study were published in the online scientific journal Plos One, reveal the real power of social media. It’s more than just a communication platform – it connects people’s goals, causes, opinions, and apparently emotions, too. Previous studies looked at the negative effects of social media on the person and the society and suggested that social media websites create a false sense of connection. So, these shared emotions might be false, but still, they have real influence on us.
