Facebook feelings are catching – study

If you’re one of Facebook’s more than one billion users and have been feeling a bit emotional lately, it may be because of those Negative Nancys and Kevin Killjoys clogging up your news feed.

At least that’s one of the take-aways from a study secretly conducted on unsuspecting Facebook users for what must have been a pretty emotional week for them in 2012.

The study, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was carried out by a team of researchers at to determine whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the Facebook News Feed.

To do this, they sneakily tweaked the algorithm by which Facebook sweeps posts into users’ news feeds, using a program to analyze whether any given textual snippet contained positive or negative words.

Some users were exposed to primarily neutral to happy information from their friends, while others got primarily neutral to sad news feeds. Then everyone’s subsequent posts were evaluated for affective meanings.

The study found that when positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred.

The findings are, at least interesting in that we now have statistical proof that social media affects our emotions in a way that’s very similar to face-to-face human interaction.

The methodology Facebook used to carry out the experiment has raised ethical questions, with many critics in the media and the academic community insisting that Facebook breached ethical guidelines, prompting this non-apology from lead researcher Adam Kramer.

It also raises some interesting questions about what other liberties Facebook has been taking with user data.

The larger debate emerging out of this seems to be about what social media companies can do to their users without asking them first or telling them about it afterwards.

Which begs the question, can we still trust social media sites? Take our poll below and tell us what you think.

You can also let us know on our Facebook page or tweet to @HighwayMail.