Catch My Happy Please
By Michelle Carr-Crowe, Top 5% San Jose Silicon Valley real estate agent
Catch my happy...please. Why? It just might help you (and me) to feel better about life, real estate and the world in general. It could even spread to our friends and colleagues we share the happy with on FaceBook.
Facebook Spreads Emotions Among Friends tells the whole story. Published by the San Jose Mercury News on June 4, 2011, the article details FaceBook research about emotional transfer via the social networking site. (FYI, the Mercury only allows free downloads of their recent articles for the first 7 days, so be sure to check out Mike Swift's story soon, or be prepared to pay for it.)
Facebook data scientist Adam D.I. Kramer analyzed postings by about 1 million English speakers and about 150 million of their FaceBook friends in the U.S. and abroad. His study showed the words people use in their status updates drive the emotions of their online friends, even days later.
Writing emotionally loaded words like "happy," "hug," "sick," and "vile" in status updates sparked similar emotions in later Facebook postings by users' friends...in fact, it affected the friends for up to three days later.
Interestingly, the affect resulted in the FaceBook friends also using more similarly emotionally loaded words; e.g. if using "happy," the friends also used an even greater number of positive words...and reduced their use of negative ones.
Before you discount Kramer's analysis, keep in mind his data is used to design and market FaceBook's social products and the advertising that powers the site. (FYI, FaceBook CEO Mark Zuckerberg studied psychology at college.)
Did you know that psychologists have long known that emotions, just like germs, are contagious? People exposed to a person experiencing strong emotions may experience similar feelings, whether happiness or anger or fear. Psychologists believe emotions are caught via facial expressions, tones of voice and even body language. But this is the first study to show emotions are also "caught" through social media.
Interestingly, the negative impact is strong. For example, for every negative word Facebook members used in a status update, such as "sick," their Facebook friends subsequently used 28 percent more negative words on the following day than would be expected, based on their pattern of speech at other times.
So be careful what you write and post about. In other words, Catch My Happy...Please.
Other stories on this post you may like:
Facebook's Gross National Happiness index www.apps.facebook.com/gnh_index
Other Facebook data team academic papers www.facebook.com/data?sk=app_4949752878.
Facebook Spreads Emotions Among Friends http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_18183052?IADID=Search-www.mercurynews.com-www.mercurynews.com&nclick_check=1
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