A study by Cornell University has discovered that emotions spread among users of social media, according to http://news.cornell.edu/
Scientists from Cornell and Facebook limited the amount of positive or negative stories that appeared in the news feed of 689,003 randomly selected Facebook users. After doing so, found that the “emotional contagion” effect identified by the went both ways.
“People who had positive content experimentally reduced on their Facebook news feed, for one week, used more negative words in their status updates,” reports Jeff Hancock, professor of communication at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and co-director of its Social Media Lab. “When news feed negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred: Significantly more positive words were used in peoples’ status updates.”
Researchers were not allowed to see the content of actual posts because of Facebook’s privacy policy.
During the study out of three million posts with a total of 122 million words, four million words were “positive” and 1.8 million were “negative,” according to the report.
According to the study, Hancock said peoples’ emotional expressions on Facebook predicted their friends’ emotional expressions, even days later.
For more information about the study, visit: http://ow.ly/yaXyr
