Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks

Lorenzo Coviello, Yunkyu Sohn, Adam D I Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Massimo Franceschetti, Nicholas A Christakis and James H Fowler

PLOS ONE, 2014, vol. 9, issue 3, 1-6

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2014
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0090315

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0090315

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