Monday, June 30, 2014

Even online, emotions can be contagious

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229754.900-even-online-emotions-can-be-contagious.html#.U7FOzfl_sb1

Feelings, like viruses, can spread through online social networks.

A team of researchers, led by Adam Kramer at Facebook in Menlo Park, California, was curious to see if this phenomenon would occur online. To find out, they manipulated which posts showed up on the news feeds of more than 600,000 Facebook users. For one week, some users saw fewer posts with negative emotional words than usual, while others saw fewer posts with positive ones.