Social Media Can Affect Your Mood

New research from the University of California, San Diego, has found negative or positive posts on Facebook can affect your mood. We know that talking to friends face-to-face can change your emotion and we often mirror our friends feelings. This has translated to online and social networks such as Facebook are proving to change your mood depending on the nature of the status updates and posts.

Over the course of three years from 2009 to 2013, Facebook analysed the emotional content of billions of updates. They looked at how updates changed when it rained and found that negative Facebook posts increased by 1.16% and positive posts decreased by 1.19%.

In stark contrast, every happy post had an even stronger impact: if a user posted a warm and happy statement, an extra 1.75 positive posts were generated.

Socially comparing our lives to our peers can change our emotions from the feelings of happiness (or jealousy) with a status update such as “It’s Monday and I’m on the beach!” accompanied by a snapshot of crystal clear water and a white sandy beach to feeling unhappy with a “Stuck in traffic…again” update.

With an increasing number of social sharing sites to share your feelings from Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook the constant need to remain connected inevitably means our emotions are controlled in this way. But if you removed Facebook or other social sharing sites from the equation, would this go away? Not necessarily. Facebook isn’t the problem, it is the symptom and only we can control our penchant to remain continuously engaged with others online. Perhaps the next time it rains you can put a positive spin on your status update considering the impact a couple of words can have on your friends.