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. 2014 Mar 12;9(3):e90315.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0090315. eCollection 2014.

Detecting emotional contagion in massive social networks

Lorenzo Coviello  1 , Yunkyu Sohn  2 , Adam D I Kramer  3 , Cameron Marlow  3 , Massimo Franceschetti  1 , Nicholas A Christakis  4 , James H Fowler  5
Affiliations

Detecting emotional contagion in massive social networks

Lorenzo Coviello et al. PLoS One. .

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.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: Two of the authors, Adam D. I. Kramer and Cameron Marlow, were employees of Facebook Inc. at the time this research was conducted. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. The official data sharing policy at Facebook is that they will work with researchers who want to replicate published findings.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Description of the data.
Temporal and geographic variation in emotions expressed by Facebook users in 2011 as measured by (a) the fraction of status updates containing positive emotion words; (b) the fraction of status updates containing negative emotion words. Extreme values are noted for holidays. (c) A map of the U.S. with approximate locations of the 100 most populous cities (represented by airport code) and their average fraction of posts with positive emotions (blue is less and green is more). (d) Network of between-city ties for all pairs of cities with at least 50,000 friendships. Darker, thicker lines indicate more friendship ties (maximum = 1,210,769).
Figure 2
Figure 2. Model estimates.
(a) Difference in emotional expression between days with and without rain. Estimates derived from first stage regressions of each measure of emotion on a binary measure of rainfall. (b) Estimates of emotional contagion between friends from the second stage of an instrumental variables regression from four separate models. The results show that rain affects emotional expression, both positive and negative posts are contagious, and positive posts tend to inhibit negative posts and vice versa. All models include fixed effects for city and day, average friends' weather in other cities, and standard errors clustered by city and day (see Text S1). Vertical bars show 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Predicted effects.
Total number of negative posts generated by a day of rainfall within a city (direct) and in other cities via contagion (indirect). Blue colors indicate higher indirect/direct effect ratio. Larger labels indicate larger population.
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Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by Army Research Office Grant W911NF-11-1-0363, and a grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.