Researchers in China have revealed that anger is the most influential emotion online inciting more responses than other emotions.
Researcher Rui Fan of Beihang University, analysed 70 million tweets from ‘Chinese Twitter’ site Weibo, over a period of six-months, after categorizing them as angry, sad, joyous and disgusting, based on users’ choice of words.
According to the Independent, the influence of the tweets was then calculated based on the frequency of replies with similar sentiments.
The research found that a sad tweet was likely to have followers respond either with sad tweets of their own, or to that original tweet.
Researchers found that whilst sadness only has a ‘trivial’ effect on others, anger is most influential, even more so than joy.
The study states that anger propagates fast and broadly in the network, a trait that could explain why the real-world events about food security, government bribery or demolition scandal are always the hot trend in internet of China. (ANI)