A social media user may not be able to catch a cold from a friend through Facebook, but he can "stick" his feelings and opinions, negative and especially positive. This is supported by a new American study, in which the Greek-American scientist, Dr. Nikolas Christakis, from University of Yale.
The main conclusion of the study is that positive messages "give birth" to other positive messages and negative messages generate other negative messages, with the "sticky" effect of the positives being comparatively greater. Specifically, as experts see, any negative message generates 1,29 more negative messages than one's friends, while any positive message "triggers" 1,75 additional positive messages.
"Radiography" on users' posts
The researchers, led by his associate Dr. Christakis, Professor James Fauler from Medical School of the University of California-San Diego, who made the relevant publication in the "PLoS One", Analyzed more than one billion subscriptions made by 100 million users from 2009 to 2012 on the popular social network.
The analysis – which took care to protect the anonymity of the users – was done with the help of the software automaticof text analysis Linguistic Inquiry Word Count, which measures the emotional content of each publication.
«Η μελέτη μας δείχνει ότι οι άνθρωποι δεν επιλέγουν απλώς άλλους ανθρώπους που τους μοιάζουν, για να αναπτύξουν το κοινωνικό τους δίκτυο, αλλά επιπλέον προκαλούν πραγματικές αλλαγές ως προς την έκφραση των συναισθημάτων και των απόψεων των φίλων τους. Τα data αποκαλύπτουν ότι οι θετικές συναιθηματικές εκφράσεις εξαπλώνονται περισσότερο από τις αρνητικές"Said Fowler.
In the digitally interconnected modern world, according to US researchers, emotional "contamination" is a reality through the spill-over effect of social networks.
Weather influences the "internet" mood
Among other things, the research showed that when it rains, the number of messages with negative affectivity charging and the number of positives decreases by 1,19%, which shows that people are susceptible even to changes in the weather, in terms of their emotions.
Fowler even appreciated that new research rather underestimates how much emotions are spreading in a "sticky" way through social networks. «It is likely that online emotional infection is even more intense than we could count"He said.
So, Facebook can contribute to either a global "epidemic" of a sense of well-being or a sense of unhappiness. People living geographically, e.g. in the same neighborhoods or cities, have greater online influence among themselves.
According to the researchers, this "contamination" has major social consequences as emotions spread in a synchronized way on a large scale through social networks, leading to the creation of large groups of people who become together when happy and unhappy, depending on the online stimuli they accept. This, stresses social scientists, "could create increasing instability in a wider context, from political systems to financial markets».
Source: tovima.gr
