New research from the University of California in San Diego, and published in the journal PLOS One, suggests that happy status updates encourage happy updates from other users.
Previous studies have shown that emotion spreads among people in direct, person-to-person contact. This "emotional contagion" has been documented among friends, acquaintances, and even among strangers.
But how successfully this contagion is mediated through online relationships is less well known.
The researchers behind the new study analyzed over a billion anonymized status updates from more than 100 million Facebook users. The users were drawn from the top 10 most populous US cities, and their Facebook updating occurred during a period of 1,180 days between January 2009 and March 2012.
However, the researchers did not read any of these social media messages. Instead, they used a piece of software called the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count that assessed the emotional content of each post for them.
Using the randomness of weather to test cause and effect
As any regular users of Facebook will know, the state of the day's weather can have an across-board effect on the mood of your contacts. The researchers noticed that rainy weather increased the number of negative posts by 1.16% and decreased the number of positive posts by 1.19%.
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