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IF YOU’RE IN the mood to vent about something or want to post a sad update, such an update could negatively impact your friends according to a new study.
The study, which was carried out by the University of California, Yale and Facebook, analysed millions of status updates between January 2009 to March 2012 which had a positive or negative focus. Researchers did not personally view any names or words posted by users, and all updates were picked out by Facebook’s algorithm.
Unsurprisingly, when it look at the impact of rainy days, it found that such days resulted in fewer positive status updates and more negative ones. When the weather was bad, negative posts increased by 1.16 per cent and positive posts decreased by 1.19 per cent as a result.
However, when they looked at the posts of those whose friends were affected by rain, but lived in other cities where it wasn’t raining, they found that such updates had a negative affect on them as well.
These friends would post 1.29 more negative posts than they would normally be expected.
In comparison, positive posts had a stronger impact on people and were more contagious, resulting in 1.75 more positive posts being uploaded.
The authors of the report said that while there were many factors that affect human emotion, what’s being expressed on social networks does have an impact on how we feel.
These results imply that emotions themselves might ripple through social networks to generate large-scale synchrony that gives rise to clusters of happy and unhappy individuals.And 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 spikes in global emotion that could generate increased volatility in everything from political systems to financial markets.
The study was posted on the scientific journal Plos One.
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All I see are cats on FB
Cats,babies and dinners…im waiting for someone to feed a baby cat dinner…
That reminds me. Must upload that shot I took of my cornflakes this morning. So golden. So milky. I make them just right.
I barely log on to FB.
What I don’t get is people you know socially linking you on LinkedIn.
Then they recommend you.
You don’t know what I’m like at work because I only ever see you in the pub.
This is going to sound ridiculous, but it’s me being honest, so here goes. Back in my facebook days, if I’d put up a status or post a video or something and nobody “liked” it, that would actually lower my mood. Nothing to do with “negative” statuses really. I used to think that nobody cared, when in fact this *was* actually the case. I know this sounds completely ridiculous, but I think that’s the problem with these social networks to an extent. I’ve heard people say things like, “tag us in this pub so people will thing our lives are exciting.”, which is a crap attitude to have. If you spent your time enjoying being out, rather than making others notice you being out, things would be a whole lot better. I must admit, I did have a hint of that when I was on it, but I soon realised that, not only did nobody really care about my irrelevant status, or silly memes, but I didn’t much care for theirs either.
Deleted Facebook not long after that. I don’t miss it at all.
Hope Spud you’re not getting too preoccupied now looking at the red and green thumbs :)
You’re spot on though in what your say!
Sometimes these researchers are hard put to it to spend their yearly budget allocation. Another “when it rains it’s wet” study.
What’s wet?
Now there’s a perfect opportunity for a study, Damocles!
As someone quite famous once remarked: “The quality of [wetness] is not strain’d, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven”.
I yearn for days of yore – when there was no bad moods in the land..
Well the old rule was that when you wake up in the morning you either push the red or green button and the resulting emotion will spread like a virus to the people you interact with throughout your day. This is just the 21st century extension. What’s interesting is since social media covers a larger area of people it can increase political and financial volatility, not just weather everyone in work will be in a pissy mood. That’s mad.
Vril likes this
So truth be told, information we see as negative make people feel less happy. Whilst positive information makes us happy.
Subjectively speaking, nice things make us happier, not nice things makes us sadder. Congratulations, I usually do not trivialise such research, but the result can be applied to every outside stimulus. Be it a shit day of TV making you feel bored and unhappy, to an conversation topic your interested in making you enthusiastic and happy to engage in.
Facebook itself puts me in a bad mood as its becoming so greedy I dont think it will stay around when the new game changing social networks start to show their presence. Most of the new ones are sharing their advertising revenue with their fans and making profit sharing a big part of their platform. You can read about them here http://followyourdream.info/
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