Does Anger Influence your Interactions on the Web?

For most of us, the online world has become a ritualistic part of our daily lives. Checking Facebook, messaging friends and loved ones and emailing colleagues are all a part of our social interaction that connects us through the world-wide-web. Other things connect us as well, including social sites that we can share our common interest through.

However, like anything else, sharing feelings of happiness or contentment also has another side, including expressions of jealousy, frustration and desire that may be shown via the online community. And a recent study shows that the most influential emotion seen online that incites responses more than any other emotion is none other than anger. 

Scientists in China analyzed emotions on the Chinese Twitter-like service Weibo and came to the conclusion that anger spread faster and more broadly than other emotions, including joy or sadness.

Lead study author Rui Fan and colleagues at Beihang University in China compared the way tweets were labeled via specific emotions that influence others in the same network. Findings from the research suggest significant implications for a better understanding of the way information spreads via social media and what this means for its users.

More than 500 million users posted around 100 million messages a day in just a four year period, according to background information from the study.

Over the span of six months in 2010, Rui and colleagues also collected close to 70 million tweets from 200,000 users. They then constructed a social network in which users linked if they mutually interacted through messages to each others re-tweets.

In order to better study those who were strongly connected, Rui ignored participants who had more than 30 interactions during a test period.

The results showed via the sentiments of each tweet in the database the various emotions contained, which were divided into the following four categories: joy, anger, sadness and disgust.

The findings conclude the way sentiments are spread via social media and how negative responses can determine interactions online.

What do you think?

More information regarding this study can be found here.