Which study manipulated social media content to study emotional contagion?

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Emotional states can spread through a network when people are exposed to others’ expressions online, so researchers can test contagion by changing what participants see in their feeds. In the Facebook study, the researchers altered the emotional content shown to about 700,000 users for a week, reducing either positive or negative posts, and then looked at the emotional tone of the users’ own subsequent posts using linguistic analysis. The results showed that exposure to more positive content led to more positive language and exposure to more negative content led to more negative language, providing experimental evidence that emotions can be transmitted through social media content. This study is distinct from the others, which examined obedience, authority, or situational roles in physical settings and did not involve manipulating online content to study emotional contagion.