Anger spreads faster than any other emotion on social media

Researchers from China's Beihang University have identified anger as the emotion most likely to be shared on social media platforms.

Rui Fan and his co-researchers tracked reposts and shares on Weibo, China's Twitter-like microblogging service, to examine which emotions prompted people to become more engaged and active online.

While humour and joy have long been used to promote and advertise products and services, Fan's team discovered that anger was the most shared emotion on social media.

Over a six month period, Fan and his team collected 70m posts from 200,000 users and identified labels denoting powerful emotions, they then followed the spread of these messages to other users connected to the orginator.

Four emoticons, combinations of numbers, letters and punctuation combined to resemble various emotional expressions, in this instance anger, sadness, joy or disgust, were also closely observed.

Sadness and disgust were the least shared emotions, with users sharing them infrequently at best, whereas feelings of joy were shared often with friends and acquaintances online. Anger, however, was by far the most shared emotion, making it an influential force across social media.

The study correlates with a 2011 study by Jonah Berger, who also found that "powerful emotions", good or bad, prompted users to share.