Can Emotions Be Contagious Online?
Just how exactly and how deeply do emotions transfer across social networks?
With the ever-increasing adoption of social media, one can only wonder whether there are any impacts on users apart from just the ability to communicate and sharing content.
Let’s go down a rabbit-hole of the current research literature surrounding the phenomenon to see if we can get to the bottom of things.
To start things off, one 2014 article published by PNAS makes an interesting claim that in fact social media can become a medium for a massive-scale emotion contagion. To elaborate, the article claims that emotional states can be transferred to others through social media so that people can experience the same emotions without their awareness.
Specifically, the authors provide experimental evidence that the dispersion of emotions can occur without direct interaction between people and without any nonverbal cues (non-verbal communication such as body movements, nuances of the voice, and facial expressions).
One important argument concerns the trend of a growing importance of social media and how its increasing popularity is affecting people in the offline world; the argument made suggests that negative news feed can generate more negative emotions within social media users for up to several days and vice…
