Research recently published, conducted by the University of California, San Diego, has discovered that emotions can spread via social media. The research looked at feelings posted on Facebook, and how contagious they are. The study, entitled “detecting emotional contagion in massive social networks”, was published in “PLOS ONE”. The researchers wanted to see if happiness, and other emotions, can spread from person to person via social networks.
To do this they used data from over one billion status updates, from over 100 million Facebook users within the USA. Interestingly, they found that Facebook status updates, which are positive, are actually more contagious than negative status updates, with negative posts resulting in 1.29 more negative posts and positive posts resulting in 1.75 positive posts.
The researchers analysed the impacts of rainy weather on status updates and they found that 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. Basically, our mood is contagious via our expressions on social networks.
Clearly, there are some potentially exciting implications of this research. The researchers talk about creating an epidemic of happiness and wellbeing via social networks, but what about the implications for social media used inside an organisation? If emotions can spread via social networks outside of work, then could this also be the case inside the workplace?
Research into the impacts of “enterprise social networks” ( i.e. social media used inside an organisation) is very hard to come by. We simply don’t yet know how ESNs impact employee wellbeing and engagement. But it doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to see how this emotional contagion could work inside organisations with far reaching benefits for improving employee engagement and wellbeing. Could we harness the power of ESNs to create a happiness epidemic at work?
With this in mind, we will be launching our own study in the coming months, which will look at the impacts of ESN on employee wellbeing and engagement. If you’re interested in getting involved please get in touch – thanks!
Emma will also be running a workshop on this subject at Melcrum’s Digital Communication Summit on April 3rd – find out more about the event here.
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Additional co-authors of the Facebook feelings study include UC San Diego political science graduate student Yunkyu Sohn; Adam D. I. Kramer and Cameron Marlow of Facebook; Massimo Franceschetti, also of UC San Diego’s Jacobs School; and Nicholas Christakis of the departments of sociology and medicine at Yale University.
Source: http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/UCSD-Researchers-Study-Spread-of-Emotions-on-Facebook-249967901.html#ixzz2xYhXYKe7 [/box]
