Emotional Contagions And Feeling Positive. Or, How Facebook Posts Affect Your Emotional Expression.

What if I told you that the Facebook posts you read can positively or negatively affect your emotions? Because according to an article I recently read in Science Codex titled "Emotional Contagion sweeps Facebook, finds new study," they can. The article discusses a new study, "Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks," which found that "people were more emotionally positive in response to positive emotion updates from their friends." Previous studies had shown this effect in "real world situations," where interaction with a happy person is contagious, but those were interactions, and in this case the researchers wondered whether "mood-laden text" can also affect mood? It turns out they can, which has all types of implications for how we might utilize social networks, feeling positive, and public health. I am wondering what you think these implications might be and I hope you will share your thoughts in the Comments section below, so we can discuss them further.

(Photo - http://www.dailygood.org/story/302/managing-emotions-in-the-workplace-do-positive-and-negative-attitudes-drive-performance-knowledge-wharton/)