Detecting emotional contagion in massive social networks

Lorenzo Coviello; Yunkyu Sohn; Adam D I Kramer; Cameron Marlow; Massimo Franceschetti; Nicholas A Christakis; James H Fowler

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0090315

Detecting emotional contagion in massive social networks

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

Authors

Lorenzo Coviello¹, Yunkyu Sohn², Adam D I Kramer³, Cameron Marlow³, Massimo Franceschetti¹, Nicholas A Christakis⁴, James H Fowler⁵

Affiliations

¹ Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, United States of America.
² Political Science Department, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, United States of America.
³ Facebook Inc., Menlo Park, California, United States of America.
⁴ Department of Sociology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America; Department of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America.
⁵ Political Science Department, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, United States of America; Medical Genetics Division, School of Medicine, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, United States of America.

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.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

Emotions*
Happiness
Humans
Models, Theoretical
Social Networking*

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.