A new study by researchers at China's Beihang University has revealed that angry posts on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like social networking site in China, are more likely to get circulated than posts that are joyful or sad in nature.
Social networking sites have become a popular means of communication. People use the sites to share their feelings or even vent their frustration. Studies on social networking behavior have become a subject of interest for researchers, of late. A new study has revealed that posts on social networking sites that portray a person's anger are widely circulated than the posts that are joyful or sad in nature.
Researchers from China's Beihang University investigated the different emotions exhibited on social networks. In 2010, computer science researcher Rui Fan and his team collected "tweets" from 200,000 users on Sina Weibo. The site has twice as many users as Twitter and is very popular in China (500 million Sina Weibo users vs 200 million Twitter users). The researchers divided the tweets in to four categories based on their nature: Anger, joy, sadness and disgust.
Researchers found that users were more likely to participate in spreading the posts that were angry in nature than posts depicting joy, sadness and disgust.
"Connected by online social ties, different users influence each other emotionally," the study reads. "We find the correlation of anger among users is significantly higher than that of joy, which indicates that angry emotion could spread more quickly and broadly in the network."
Researcher Fan and his colleagues found that the circulation of Weibo posts portraying sadness and disgust was small, comparatively joyful tweets had more influence on other users. However, it was found that anger was the most circulated emotion of all.
The study does reveal how people react to different emotions, but as the study was limited to China users, it would be difficult to draw conclusions. Moreover, researchers noted that most angry posts were in response to politics in China, so it may be even possible that people's reactions may differ in different countries.
