By Bruce Bower
SAN DIEGO — Facebook users can spread emotions to their online connections just by posting a written message, or status update, that’s positive or negative, says a psychologist who works for the wildly successful social network.
This finding challenges the idea that emotions get passed from one person to another via vocal cues, such as rising or falling tone, or by a listener unconsciously imitating a talker’s body language, said Adam Kramer on January 27 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Kramer works at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.
“It’s time to rethink how emotional contagion works, since vocal cues and mimicry aren’t needed,” Kramer said. “Facebook users’ emotion leaks into the emotional worlds of their friends.”
Preliminary evidence that the emotional undercurrent of a person’s online messages affect his or her friends supports Kramer’s argument, says psychology graduate student Jamie Guillory of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Guillory and Cornell psychologist Jeffrey Hancock found that groups of three friends communicating by instant messaging used a greater number of negative words and solved a joint task better after one friend had just watched a film clip showing one child bullied by a bigger kid, versus a neutral film clip.