Apparently positive status updates, which convey joy and happiness, provoke exactly the same in others, which makes happiness viral thanks to social networks.
The study, published in the journal Plos One and led by a team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego (USA), suggests that status updates that evoke positive emotions and happiness provoke new updates of glee among other users of the network , be they friends, acquaintances or even strangers.
The researchers conducted a study of more than 1 billion anonymous status updates among nearly 100 million users of the social network Facebook during the months of January and March 2012. All messages were analyzed with a software tool that evaluated the emotional content of each of them.
The results of the analysis showed that negative status updates had much less influence on the mood of others than positive ones. The messages that expressed sadness or unhappiness provoked 1.19 negative messages; the messages of happiness prompted 1.79 new positive messages .
According to one of the study authors, “If an emotional change in one person spreads and causes a change in many of them, then it is likely that we are considerably underestimating their possibilities. We should be doing everything we can to measure the effects of social media and learn to magnify them to try to create a wellness epidemic. "
