The spread of emotion via Facebook

Auteur-es

Adam D. I. Kramer

Nombre Auteurs

1

Titre

The spread of emotion via Facebook

Année de publication

2012

Référence (APA)

Kramer, A. D. I. (2012). The spread of emotion via facebook. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 767‑770. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2207787

résumé

In this paper we study large-scale emotional contagion through an examination of Facebook status updates. After a user makes a status update with emotional content, their friends are significantly more likely to make a valence-consistent post.

This effect is significant even three days later, and even after controlling for prior emotion expressions by both users and their friends. This indicates not only that emotional contagion is possible via text-only communication and that emotions flow through social networks, but also that emotion spreads via indirect communications media.

Mots-clés

Computer-mediated communication; emotional contagion;
emotion; Facebook; social networks

URL

https://research.facebook.com/file/2916163195290181/the-spread-of-emotion-via-facebook.pdf

doi

https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2207787

Accessibilité de l'article

Libre

Champ

Data science

Type contenu (théorique Applicative méthodologique)

Théorique, méthodologique

Méthode

Computationnelle, Predictive, hierarchical logistic regression, multi-day lagged regression design

Cas d'usage

Facebook

Objectifs de l'article

This article examine the implications of emotional contagion theory for social networks, to determine whether emotions spread through SNSs, and to contribute to a growing body of evidence suggesting that interaction with "friends" on SNSs mirrors offline interactions.

"We examine an important implication of emotional contagion theory: whether and how emotions “spread” via SNSs."

Question(s) de recherche/Hypothèses/conclusion

The research question was whether and how emotions spread via SNSs.

The hypothesis was that emotional contagion occurs through indirect communication on social networks.

"We predict that when users use positive or negative words (i.e., express positive or negative affect [13]), their friends' emotional states will be affected: Those friends will express more of the corresponding emotion (i.e., use positive or negative words in subsequent updates)"

The conclusions were that emotional contagion does occur through Facebook status updates, and that this has important implications for our understanding of psychological processes and social interactions.

Cadre théorique/Auteur.es

The theoretical framework of the article includes psychology, emotional contagion theory and the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, with main authors cited including Murray, Pennebaker, and Fredrickson.

Concepts clés

Emotional suppression, Emotional contagion, Positive emotions

Données collectées (type source)

The data collected was a large dataset of Facebook status updates

Définition des émotions

LIWC

Ampleur expérimentation (volume de comptes)

61,289 users

Technologies associées

Hive Data Warehousing

Mention de l'éthique

"no researchers ever saw any user-generated text in an identified form, in compliance with Facebook’s Terms of Service"

Finalité communicationnelle

Exploring the spread of emotions through social networks