Interacting with a happy person is pleasant (and an unhappy person, unpleasant). An experimental approach can address this scrutiny directly however, methods used in controlled experiments have been criticized for examining emotions after social interactions. The interpretation of this network effect as contagion of mood has come under scrutiny due to the study’s correlational nature, including concerns over misspecification of contextual variables or failure to account for shared experiences ( 4, 5), raising important questions regarding contagion processes in networks. This work also suggests that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions, in-person interaction and nonverbal cues are not strictly necessary for emotional contagion, and that the observation of others’ positive experiences constitutes a positive experience for people. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. Data from a large real-world social network, collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks, although the results are controversial.
Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments, with people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.
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