Posting happiness

Your friends can have a big influence on you. They can influence which movies you choose to see, they can impact your fashion sense and they can determine where you choose to eat. These things are significant but, more than all of that, research tells us that your friends can influence your emotions. In fact, even strangers have been shown to have an emotionally contagious effect. In the social media era, psychologists have been wondering whether social media posts and tweets can also have an emotionally contagious quality. This was the topic of a new study, which came up with some powerful results.

For their study, the researchers analysed more than one billion status updates from more than 100 million Facebook users between January 2009 and March 2012. The researchers did not read any messages but used word analysis software to determine the emotional content of each update.

The first thing they found was that rainy weather significantly increases the number of negative posts that people make and decreases the amount of positive posts. They then looked at negative posts made by people in rainy cities and then looked at posts by Facebook friends of those people who were in cities where it was not raining at the time of those posts.

The findings showed that negative posts by people in rainy cities prompted at least another 1.29 (on average) negative posts from people in non-rainy cities. Equally, a positive post prompted on average 1.79 positive posts by people in remote cities from the original poster.

So, just like you can catch a mood from face-to-face friends and acquaintances, it seems that moods on social media have a viral quality, too. That’s good news because you can spread some happiness just by making a few positive posts. As the saying goes, “Put on a happy Facebook”.