

Facebook spreads rainy-day blues to sunny places, study says - tokenadult
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-facebook-emotional-contagion-20140311,0,7783839.story#axzz2vr1qa6wL

======
tokenadult
The study publication in PLOS ONE is "Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive
Social Networks."

[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0090315)

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0090315

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."

