In a bad mood? You might have Facebook to blame.
Emotions can spread virally through social media sites such as Facebook, according to a team of researchers at the University of California, Yale University and Facebook.
After analyzing more than 1 billion status updates from more than 100 million users of Facebook in the United States, the researchers found that negative posts on the social networking site were typically followed by more in the same vein.
“Emotions themselves ripple through social networks to generate large-scale synchrony that gives rise to clusters of happy and unhappy individuals,” the researchers write in the study published in the online scientific journal PLOS ONE.
Rainy days and Facebook updates
Researchers examined anonymous status updates posted between 2009 and 2012, and used software called the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count to measure the emotion of each post.
The researchers looked at whether rainy days influenced Facebook posts in order to test whether moods did in fact spread through the site.
It turns out that gloomy days increased the number of negative posts by 1.16 per cent. Positive posts decreased on those days by 1.19 per cent.
Then, to control for the weather factor, the researchers examined the Facebook posts of their friends who lived in different cities, and removed all weather-related updates from their analysis.
The result? Each additional negative post yielded 1.29 more negative posts among a person’s friends.
Positive posts more influential than negative ones
On the other hand, each positive post generated an additional 1.75 positive posts amongst friends, signalling that positive emotions were even more contagious than negative ones.
“Although there are many factors that affect human emotions, we have confirmed here that individual expression of emotions depends on what others in an individual’s social network are expressing,” the researchers write.
The researchers say the findings are significant, as “new technologies online may be increasing this synchrony by giving people more avenues to express themselves to a wider range of social contacts.”
“As a result, we may see greater spiked in global emotion that could generate increased volatility in everything from political systems to financial markets,” they say.
