Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks

By Lorenzo Coviello, Yunkyu Sohn, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron A. Marlow, Massimo Franceschetti, Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler. PLoS ONE, 2014

493 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Happiness and other emotions spread between people in direct contact, but it is unclear whether massive online social networks also contribute to this spread. Here, we elaborate a novel method for measuring the contagion of emotional expression. With data from millions of Facebook users, we show that rainfall directly influences the emotional content of their status messages, and it also affects the status messages of friends in other cities who are not experiencing rainfall. For every one person affected directly, rainfall alters the emotional expression of about one to two other people, suggesting that online social networks may magnify the intensity of global emotional synchrony.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c4d0a65c0a7b45e8b1f94c9185c7bebd2c9de560

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In Sociology and Political Science

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

How Adolescents Use Social Media to Cope with Feelings of Loneliness and Anxiety During COVID-19 Lockdown (2020, unknown): “53 This may lead to emotional dysfunctional coping behavior and possible panic reactions, such as the hoarding of toilet paper during COVID-19, which was activated on social media.”
Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media (2015, background): “Various recent contributions advanced the hypothesis that emotions may be passed also via online interactions [23, 32, 21, 9, 19, 13, 12].”
Emotional States vs. Emotional Words in Social Media (2015, methodology): “2786473 rd Counts [29]) has been used to infer“emotion contagion”[21, 6, 13], “life satisfaction” [19], and overall “happiness” [32] of social media users.”
Natural language processing in mental health applications using non-clinical texts† (2017, background): “Also relevant to this discussion is the study completed by Coviello et al. (2014) which explored how negative emotion spreads as a contagion between Facebook accounts.”
Group Emotions: Cutting the Gordian Knots Concerning Terms, Levels of Analysis, and Processes (2015, background): “A study of Facebook messages showed that people tended to express more negative emotions in posts on rainy days, compared to other days, and that those posts then tended to influence the emotions of recipients in geographically different regions, infusing the recipients’ own messages with a downbeat”
The emotional responses of browsing Facebook: Happiness, envy, and the role of tie strength (2015, background): “, 1993; Neumann & Strack, 2000), but also in computer-mediated-communication (Cheshin et al., 2011; Coviello et al., 2014; Kramer, 2012).”
Social Networking Sites, Depression, and Anxiety: A Systematic Review (2016, background): “Even passive exposure to the language used in SNS posts has been shown to influence the emotive language subsequently expressed by the receiving SNS user, where positive or negative emotions are argued to transfer via contagion [33-35].”