Emotional Contagion - You're Bringing Me Down Man!

We've all come across people who are described as "fun suckers" or alternatively "light up the room" whenever they are present. These are both extreme examples of how a person's mood can influence others around them. Away from the extremes we are still very much influenced by the emotions of those around us; family , friends and work colleagues. As well as influencing how we feel our social networks can also influence what we do and the lifestyle behaviors we choose. Research from the Department of Healthcare Policy at Harvard published a few years ago showed that a person's chance of becoming obese in any given time frame increased by 57% if he or she had a friend who became obese during that same period. Their research showed this to be a very consistent effect across the network and held true for other lifestyle related behaviors such as smoking and heavy alcohol consumption.

This research paper, just published in PLOS One, by researchers at UC San Diego looked at Facebook status update data between January 2009 and March 2012 to determine whether status updates by users had a discernible affect on the emotions of their friends who were not in the same city as them. There's some pretty high end math in the paper, but putting that aside they showed that rainfall directly influenced the emotional content of the status messages of individuals and that this in turn affected the emotional content of the status messages of their friends in other cities not experiencing rainfall. The researchers used the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to assess the positivity and negativity of messages posted.  

This is fascinating stuff, and shows that we don't have to be in the same physical location as someone to potentially influence how they feel (or indeed be influenced by how they feel). The question arises whether this affect through a digital social network is confined just to emotion or whether, like in physical social networks, it also extends to influencing others' actions and choices?

As many of us spend increasing proportions of our waking hours communicating by digital means, and possibly less time than we used to in face-to-face interactions, this is certainly an area that warrants further investigation. In addition it bodes well for digital social networks as a catalyst for positive health behavior change in society.  

As an addendum, when I run this blog post through the free version of the LIWC software I get a count of 1.27 positive emotions to 0.51 negative emotions. So all in all pretty happy!  

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