When you’re with happy people, you feel happy. When you’re with grumpy people, you feel grumpy.
Have you ever considered how the internet affects your emotions?
I am someone who is extremely emotionally invested in nearly every aspect of my life.
I feel feelings very deeply. I don’t always like talking about my feelings, but I almost always feel a need to act upon my feelings.
I am also someone who tends to pick up on the feelings of others, and generally, if I’m with someone who is sad, I feel really, really sad.
And this still impacts my life today. I have found that my emotions always tend to mirror those of the people around me.
I've tried to see the positive aspects of being an emotionally invested individual by relating it to my future career. When I wrote my essays for my nursing school application, I had to write about two attributes that I saw in myself that I thought would help me as a nurse. One of the attributes that I named was my own empathy. I feel other people’s feelings. During my time as a CNA, I think that my empathy has certainly allowed me to be a more compassionate caregiver.
Unfortunately, feeling other’s feelings as a caregiver isn’t always beneficial to the caregiver. Oftentimes, I take those feelings home with me, and I have to work through those feelings when I'm off the clock.
This phenomenon has actually been named. It’s referred to as emotional contagion, the idea that people tend to feel the feelings of those around us.
In Unit 7, of my Psychological Effects of the Internet Class, we watched a TED talk by Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician who graduated from Harvard Medical School. Christakis has done a lot of research regarding social networking and emotional contagion.
He demonstrated that people do not simply experience emotional contagion in pairs. Rather, we experience emotional contagion throughout our social networks. In other words, if your friends of your friends are happy, you, yourself have a greater chance of feeling happy than if your friends of friends were not happy.
This can easily come to manifest on social networking websites. In fact, our class was assigned to read a study completed by researchers at Facebook. This study demonstrated that when users were exposed to Facebook posts with more negative vibes, those users were more likely to make posts with more negative words.
I experienced this myself as a Twitter user; the negativity that I saw on the site actually changed my mood and changed the way I spoke in day-to-day life. Around the time of my freshman year of college, I was experiencing a lot of anxiety about school, and every day felt like a battle. When I read through my Twitter feed, I felt as though my mood worsened even more because so many of the posts that I read were retweets regarding the struggles of student life. I found myself starting to use phrases like, “I want to die,” in a more casual way than I did in the past due to my exposure to negative Twitter posts.
I hated talking this way, so I completely deleted my twitter. I didn’t want to get in the habit of using suicidal comments in a joking way. Ever since I deleted Twitter, I feel as though I have a better, more positive outlook on my life.
Some people found the initial research study conducted by Facebook to be unethical. Indeed, Facebook intentionally manipulated the feelings of its users. However, I think that raising users awareness of how their social media use may impact their feelings is an important enough cause to go forward with the study. Without this study, fewer people would be aware of the emotional salience tied to social media, and therefore, would be less likely to recognize how their social media consumption changes their mood.
When you’re using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever floats your social networking boat, remember that what you’re consuming can actually change your mood! Don’t let your angry Facebook friends make you angry. Be a passive consumer of social media. Just sit back and scroll, and try not to let it impact your life too much. If you can’t bear it, in the words of Hilary Clinton, “Delete Your Account.”
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