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Wondering whether your attempts to spread joy throughout the world via Twitter are working?

The results of an interesting study from China’s Beihang University on how effective certain emotions are on social media have just been released, and while your warm fuzzies do show a tendency to spread, anger is far more likely to be catching.

According to The Physics Arxiv Blog:

The results were something of a surprise. When it comes to sadness and disgust, Rui and his colleagues found very little correlation between users.

Sadness and disgust do not easily spread through the network in this way. They found a higher correlation among users who tweeted joyful messages.

But the highest correlation by far was among angry users. Rui said anger strongly influences the neighborhood in which it appears, spreading on average by about three degrees. “Anger has a surprisingly higher correlation than other emotions,” the researchers said.

Rui Fan and his team focused on a platform similar to Twitter called Weibo and also found that the events most likely to spark anger involved conflicts between China and other countries and social issues in China itself.

As was pointed out in the article, though, it would be interesting to see if a similar study done in the West would garner the same results, but perhaps we need only look at the reactions to our latest rant to find out.

Full story at Mashable.

Venting our angst on social media.

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