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Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media

Social media are used as main discussion channels by millions of individuals every day. The content individuals produce in daily social-media-based micro-communications, and the emotions therein expressed, may impact the emotional states of others. A recent experiment performed on Facebook hypothesi...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Ferrara, Emilio, Yang, Zeyao
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4636231/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26544688
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0142390
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author Ferrara, Emilio
Yang, Zeyao
author_facet Ferrara, Emilio
Yang, Zeyao
author_sort Ferrara, Emilio
collection PubMed
description Social media are used as main discussion channels by millions of individuals every day. The content individuals produce in daily social-media-based micro-communications, and the emotions therein expressed, may impact the emotional states of others. A recent experiment performed on Facebook hypothesized that emotions spread online, even in absence of non-verbal cues typical of in-person interactions, and that individuals are more likely to adopt positive or negative emotions if these are over-expressed in their social network. Experiments of this type, however, raise ethical concerns, as they require massive-scale content manipulation with unknown consequences for the individuals therein involved. Here, we study the dynamics of emotional contagion using a random sample of Twitter users, whose activity (and the stimuli they were exposed to) was observed during a week of September 2014. Rather than manipulating content, we devise a null model that discounts some confounding factors (including the effect of emotional contagion). We measure the emotional valence of content the users are exposed to before posting their own tweets. We determine that on average a negative post follows an over-exposure to 4.34% more negative content than baseline, while positive posts occur after an average over-exposure to 4.50% more positive contents. We highlight the presence of a linear relationship between the average emotional valence of the stimuli users are exposed to, and that of the responses they produce. We also identify two different classes of individuals: highly and scarcely susceptible to emotional contagion. Highly susceptible users are significantly less inclined to adopt negative emotions than the scarcely susceptible ones, but equally likely to adopt positive emotions. In general, the likelihood of adopting positive emotions is much greater than that of negative emotions.
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spelling pubmed-46362312015-11-13 Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media Ferrara, Emilio Yang, Zeyao PLoS One Research Article Social media are used as main discussion channels by millions of individuals every day. The content individuals produce in daily social-media-based micro-communications, and the emotions therein expressed, may impact the emotional states of others. A recent experiment performed on Facebook hypothesized that emotions spread online, even in absence of non-verbal cues typical of in-person interactions, and that individuals are more likely to adopt positive or negative emotions if these are over-expressed in their social network. Experiments of this type, however, raise ethical concerns, as they require massive-scale content manipulation with unknown consequences for the individuals therein involved. Here, we study the dynamics of emotional contagion using a random sample of Twitter users, whose activity (and the stimuli they were exposed to) was observed during a week of September 2014. Rather than manipulating content, we devise a null model that discounts some confounding factors (including the effect of emotional contagion). We measure the emotional valence of content the users are exposed to before posting their own tweets. We determine that on average a negative post follows an over-exposure to 4.34% more negative content than baseline, while positive posts occur after an average over-exposure to 4.50% more positive contents. We highlight the presence of a linear relationship between the average emotional valence of the stimuli users are exposed to, and that of the responses they produce. We also identify two different classes of individuals: highly and scarcely susceptible to emotional contagion. Highly susceptible users are significantly less inclined to adopt negative emotions than the scarcely susceptible ones, but equally likely to adopt positive emotions. In general, the likelihood of adopting positive emotions is much greater than that of negative emotions. Public Library of Science 2015-11-06 /pmc/articles/PMC4636231/ /pubmed/26544688 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0142390 Text en © 2015 Ferrara, Yang http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Ferrara, Emilio
Yang, Zeyao
Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media
title Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media
title_full Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media
title_fullStr Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media
title_full_unstemmed Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media
title_short Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media
title_sort measuring emotional contagion in social media
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4636231/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26544688
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0142390
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