Facebook users may want to check their friend list. If a person has negative friends with posts that go viral, their friends will be infected with a negative mood, too.
The bright side is that the cure spreads even faster, a positive post is even more likely to spread, a new study found. Emotions are contagious and Facebook users are transferring their feelings, affecting each other across the country.
Over one billion status updates were made anonymous, then studied, covering Jan. 2009 through March 2012. The results, published in PLOS ONE, come from over 100 million different users across all major American cities. Exposure to positive posts results in more positive posts, and negative posts work the same way and spread more negative posts. However, positivity is a better contagion, and the more upbeat posts are more likely to spread.
“We wanted to see if emotional changes in one person caused emotional changes in another person and that’s exactly what we found,” said UC San Diego political scientist James Fowler, lead author of the study. He is also a professor of medical genetics and political sciences at UCSD.
They tracked rainfall and watched to see if cloudy days Chicago would affect how Sand Diego friends felt about their day. “When it rains on you, you write more negative posts,” Fowler said, “but it affects your friends too.” There will be a “transmission” or transfer, of those emotions through Facebook as one or two people reading will take on these contagions emotions expressed within the post they read.
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