What Facebook’s ‘emotion experiment’ tells us about mood

Facebook has just released the findings of a (pretty controversial) ‘emotion’ study it undertook in 2012. ‘A small percentage’ of emotional wordswere hidden from approx 700,000 people’s news feeds over the course of one week to see the effect on their online behaviour.

The words and phrases chosen were generally considered to represent happy, sad, angry, jealous, anxious or stressed emotions. The researchers bothlimitedand increased exposure to thesewords and then monitored the effect this had...