Study: Yes, Facebook is Affecting Your Moods

Think twice before scrolling through your News Feed every morning.
Think twice before scrolling through your News Feed every morning.

Common wisdom says that Facebook makes you sad and lonely because it forces you to compare yourself with others -- people often cite a study that came out last year which claimed to prove this. But new research suggests that any emotions on Facebook spread quickly, just like viral videos or pictures of cute cats, and that positive feelings spread even more than negative ones.

Related: 9 Things You Didn't Even Know Were Contagious

The University of California San Diego study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, analyzed data from 100 million Facebook users, who posted nearly a billion updates between 2009 and 2012. For every positive emotion in a status update, there were one to two additional updates in the average user's network expressing similar emotions. Each "I love my life!"-type post also reduced the number of "I hate everything"-type posts by friends by nearly one-half, while negative updates lowered positive posts by 1.3 times.

"Our study suggests that people are not just choosing other people like themselves to associate with but actually causing their friends' emotional expressions to change," said study lead author James Fowler, a professor of medical genetics and political science. In previous research, Fowler has found other things to be socially contagious, such as obesity, smoking habits, happiness, generosity, and even eating disorders.

Related: The New Way to Make Friends

Since bad weather has been shown to put a damper on the mood of Facebook posts, researchers also wanted to see if peoples' rainy-day blues affected the moods of their friends in sunnier places. They did. "For every one person affected directly, rainfall alters the emotional expression of about one to two other people," says the research.

- By Natalie Gontcharova

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