Beaver Falls, PA -- (SBWIRE) -- 10/10/2014 -- How do emoticons affect the emotions of people on Facebook?

In a study conducted by a team from both Facebook and Cornell University, it was found out that emotional influence of social media is way more intricate than what we thought. When this team maneuvered a number of users’ news feeds as part of their study, they discovered waves of emotional infection that vary either positively or negatively through a social web. What does this mean for Facebook users? It shows that posting something positive positively affects your Facebook friends, while posting something negative negatively affects your audience. In their published study, this team of researchers expressed that, “These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.”

How Positive is “Positive”?

While emotional contagion is a good avenue for letting people improve themselves and their personalities (as the desire to make others happy would make people become responsible in what they post eventually), a 2008 study from the University of California counters the popular belief that social media, Facebook in particular, weakens the mental health. With different social media sites and apps intensifying the ability of people to present themselves in a more positive light, critics still find the consequences to this ability as more catastrophic. In an article published by Huffington Post entitled “Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy”, it says that “The gap between one's reality and one's unrealistic dreams constitutes "envy, inadequacy, frustration, disappointment."

Would the role of emotional contagion rule out the adverse effects of social media’s capabilities?

In the said study about emotional contagion, the team manipulated the quantity of positive or negative posts that were seen on the users’ news feeds. Based on statistics derived from this manipulation, Facebook users who saw fewer negative posts were more likely to post positive things on their walls. So this proves that emotions can be transferred on the basis of emotional content.

Jeffrey Hancock, one of the authors of the study from Cornell University, said that “Online messages influence our experience of emotions, which may affect a variety of offline behaviors”. This in turn can affect the health of a person.

Agree or Disagree?

We, Facebook users, can simply identify within ourselves if this study is true or not. Using positive Facebook emoticons for status, for instance, can certainly affect friends on one’s Facebook list while scrolling on the newsfeed. Using positive Facebook emoticons in messages for a more intimate and personal communication between users adds not just fun, but can certainly encourage positive mood for everyone.

About Mogicons: Facebook Emoticons
Mogicons Facebook Emoticons has a large collection of facebook emoticons that will surely appear pretty much everywhere on facebook. With Mogicons’ emoticons users can now give their words a personality and astonish their friends with thousands of funny and entertaining emoticons and stickers.