Television has long been regarded as the “idiot box”, with viewers sent into an unthinking trance by whatever it is they happen to be watching. It’s a phrase that suggests a level of emotional contagion that spreads from the screen to our living room.
A recent study from Tilburg University wanted to test whether the same occurs when we watch videos on YouTube. The researchers examined over 2,000 video blogs on the site to see whether viewers mirrored the emotions of the presenters of the videos, and then what impact this has on our subsequent behavior.
Online contagion
The act of being affected by others’ emotions is known as contagion, and this is believed to also affect our subsequent behaviors, with people more likely to seek out others like themselves, which is known as homophily.
There are approximately 5 billion videos viewed on YouTube each and every day, but the researchers wanted to focus their attention on vlogs, as the vloggers are more inclined to share their emotions and experiences in their videos.
The team sought out channels with a decent amount of popularity (a minimum of 10,000 subscribers), and to measure the emotion of the viewers, the researchers analyzed the type of words used in the comments below each video. This analysis allowed them to model both the immediate (contagion) and the sustained (homophily) impact of the videos.
The analysis revealed both an immediate and sustained impact of the emotions of the vloggers on their audience. For instance, when a video was generally positive in its tone, the viewers would respond with heightened positive emotions, with the same true for various other emotional states.
This is believed to be the first study to explore whether contagion and homophily apply to YouTube, but other studies have found a similar phenomenon on sites like Twitter and Facebook.
“Our social life might move more and more to the online sphere, but our emotions and the way we behave towards one another will always be steered by basic psychological processes,” the authors conclude.
