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Facebook is one of the most popular forms of social media. Not only does it connect people with one another, it can also increase awareness about different causes, such as human and animal rights throughout the world. In a new study, social scientists from Cornell University, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Facebook, examined the effects that positive and negative statuses had on other users. The team discovered that emotions, in general, could spread rapidly between social network users.

For this type of research, the team randomly selected 689,003 Facebook users. They examined the frequency of positive or negative stories that popped up on people's newsfeed by identifying key words. In over three million posts made up of 122 million words, the team identified four million positive words and 1.8 million negative words. The researchers did not actually read the statuses or stories.

The team analyzed the effects that positive or negative words had on the user's own status. They found that when a user was more exposed to positive words, the user was more likely to have statuses that contained positive words. The same effect was found for negative words.

"People who had positive content experimentally reduced on their Facebook news feed, for one week, used more negative words in their status updates," Jeff Hancock, professor of communication at Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and co-director of its Social Media Lab, stated according to the press release. "When news feed negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred: Significantly more positive words were used in peoples' status updates."

The researchers explained that this "emotional contagion" can greatly affect users' moods and behaviors. For example, the team noted that people who saw fewer positive posts were more likely to be less expressive over the upcoming days. The team believes that more research examining the effects of social media on people's overall health is essential.

"Online messages influence our experience of emotions, which may affect a variety of offline behaviors," Hancock said.

The study, "Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks," was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.