Self-presentation and emotional contagion on Facebook: new experimental measures of profiles' emotional coherence

TL;DR

This study introduces new measures to analyze emotional coherence between Facebook posts and comments, revealing that emotional content increases engagement and that empathetic profiles tend to self-present excessively, driven by attention-seeking motives.

Contribution

The paper develops novel experimental measures for emotional loading and coherence, and explores their relation to self-presentation and engagement on Facebook.

Findings

Positive posts receive more likes and comments.

Emotional coherence correlates with higher engagement.

Empathetic profiles tend to self-present excessively.

Abstract

Social Networks allow users to self-present by sharing personal contents with others which may add comments. Recent studies highlighted how the emotions expressed in a post affect others' posts, eliciting a congruent emotion. So far, no studies have yet investigated the emotional coherence between wall posts and its comments. This research evaluated posts and comments mood of Facebook profiles, analyzing their linguistic features, and a measure to assess an excessive self-presentation was introduced. Two new experimental measures were built, describing the emotional loading (positive and negative) of posts and comments, and the mood correspondence between them was evaluated. The profiles "empathy", the mood coherence between post and comments, was used to investigate the relation between an excessive self-presentation and the emotional coherence of a profile. Participants publish a higher average number of posts with positive mood. To publish an emotional post corresponds to get more likes, comments and receive a coherent mood of comments, confirming the emotional contagion effect reported in literature. Finally, the more empathetic profiles are characterized by an excessive self-presentation, having more posts, and receiving more comments and likes. To publish emotional contents appears to be functional to receive more comments and likes, fulfilling needs of attention-seeking.