Emotions shape what goes viral on social media

In social media, not all feelings travel the same way. A new peer-reviewed study finds that anxiety, love, and surprise tend to carry posts farther, while anger, sadness, and even joy can slow things down.

The team analyzed 387,486 articles shared by more than 6 million users on WeChat, then tracked how each article spread through the network using a dictionary of emotion words tied to eight distinct feelings.

Emotions and social media posts

The research was led by Yifan Yu, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business.

The paper helps resolve the long-standing debate over whether simply classifying something as positive or negative is sufficient to explain sharing.

“Expressions of anxiety exhibit the most positive impact on online content diffusion,” wrote Yu and colleagues.

The authors worked with eight discrete emotions: anxiety, sadness, anger, disgust, love, joy, surprise, and anticipation. They detected these emotions using a custom lexicon built and validated for large-scale text analysis.

Tracking social media spread

The researchers reconstructed each article’s diffusion cascade, then measured size, depth, maximum breadth, and a property known as structural virality.

Those metrics capture how many people a post reaches and the shape of its spread through different layers of reshares.

The new study reports that anxiety, love, and surprise push cascades to reach more people and spread more deeply and broadly. Anger, sadness, and joy correlate with smaller or shallower cascades in this dataset.

Online sharing and emotional arousal

Patterns also differed by audience. Older users were more likely to share articles steeped in anger or anxiety, while younger users were more drawn to disgust-laden content.

Network position mattered. Users with many friends tended to share articles showing love, anxiety, anticipation, or disgust, while users with fewer friends were more likely to pass along anger or surprise.

Ties shaped the path as well. Anger and anxiety spread more through strong ties, and articles marked by sadness drew less participation from female users than from male users in this sample.

Where earlier work highlighted the power of emotional arousal, the new results show that arousal is not the whole story.

Even when emotions share the same valence and arousal, their specific effects can diverge. Broader research on emotion and decision-making shows that particular emotions shape judgment and behavior in distinct ways.

Culture changes social media emotions

Language and culture shape how emotions are expressed and understood online. On the Chinese platform WeChat, communication often blends text with stickers, voice notes, and short videos.

Emotional cues may be interpreted differently on WeChat compared to Western social networks. This makes cultural context a key factor in understanding why certain emotions may boost or hinder sharing.

Studies have shown that cultural norms influence not only which emotions are acceptable to express publicly, but also how strongly those emotions are conveyed.

These norms can alter the meaning and perceived appropriateness of emotional language, potentially amplifying or muting a post’s viral potential.

Using emotions in social media

Writers and editors can treat emotion as a design choice, not a blunt instrument. Anxiety and love often motivate people to connect, support, or warn, which can translate into sharing when handled with care and useful context.

Platforms could develop tools to gauge the emotional intensity of rapidly spreading content and flag unusually charged streams for policy review. This may help prevent harmful content without unfairly punishing people for having negative feelings.

Responsible use matters. Emotion can inform and mobilize, but it can also overwhelm and mislead if it becomes the message rather than the signal for what to do next.

Why social media posts matter

Previous research on structural virality shows that even when two posts reach the same number of people, they can spread in very different patterns – and those patterns reveal insights about influence and how resistant content is to moderation.

Interest in how emotions shape online sharing keeps growing. A recent review of research on sentiment diffusion shows that emotions affect not just how fast information spreads, but also how widely it reaches.

The main takeaway is simple: if you want people to share something, the specific emotion you trigger matters just as much as whether it is positive or negative.

The study is published in Information Systems Research.

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