Stop being an angry bird on social media

Negative rants on Facebook and Twitter can unfavourably impact your emotional well-being

Sending angry, negative chat messages on Facebook and Twitter is likely to hurt you, causing ripple effects on your emotions to persist for several minutes, a study has found. On the other hand, positive chat resonates for a few seconds, generally, according to a study by researchers at University of California (UC) Davis in the US. “It’s not just that this negative chat has a long life,” said Seth Frey, an assistant professor at UC Davis.

“But it has a longer effect on the original speaker. Negative people are really hurting themselves,” said Frey, lead author of the study published in the journal Behavior Research Methods. Researchers looked at hundreds of millions of chat room messages, over many months, in about 600,000 conversations among young people playing a popular online social game.

Most of the million participants worldwide were between eight and 12 years of age. The data showed that a positive message does not just cause changes in others, but ripples back to the original sender. The effects of a sender’s message start rippling back quickly, after just two seconds, and continue for a minute.

However, chat containing negative messages or words affects others more strongly and continues to ripple back from a chat audience for up to eight minutes on average. The result is a “feedback loop” in which one instance of negativity causes a stream of negativity that continues to perpetuate itself.

Positive and negative statements were measured with a sentiment analysis toolkit typically used for short Twitter posts. The findings show that emotions ripple online in ways that we can’t always measure in in-person, one-on-one conversations, said Frey.