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Abstract
Objectives This paper examines how people express personal mood concurrently with those connected with them by one or two degrees of separation.
Design Participatory cohort study.
Setting Online contact diary.
Participants 133 participants kept online diaries for 7 months in 2014, which included 127 455 contacts with 12 070 persons.
Main outcome measures Diary keepers rated a contacted person’s mood during each specific contact, as well as the strength of ties between any pairs of such contacted persons. Such rich information about ties and contacts enable us to construct a complete contact network for each diary keeper, along with the network members’ mood and tie strength. We calculate one’s overall mood by that person’s average mood score during the study period and take the shortest path between any given pair of contacted persons as the degree of separation. We further assume that two connecting persons in a contact network have made contact with each other during the study period, which allows us to examine whether and how personal moods occur concurrently within these contact networks.
Results Using mixed-effects models while controlling for covariates at individual, tie and contact levels, we show that personal mood score positively and significantly correlates with the average mood among those directly tied to the person. The same effect remains positive and significant for those connected to the person by two degrees, although the effect size is reduced by about one-half. The mood of anyone separated by more than two degrees is statistically irrelevant.
Conclusions Applying network perspectives and rich data at both tie and contact levels to inquiries about subjective well-being, the current study sheds new light on how an improved diary approach can help explain the sophisticated ways in which individuals express their personal moods concurrently during social interactions in everyday life, contact by contact.
- contact diary
- emotional contagion
- social networks
- transmission of mood
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Footnotes
Y-F and J-SH contributed equally.
Contributors J-SH and Y-CF proposed the research project to and obtained funding from Academia Sinica, Taiwan. T-CC, T-JY and J-SH designed the study. T-CC, T-JY, T-HH and J-SH were involved in data collection. T-JY, T-HH and J-SH provided statistical expertise. T-HH analysed the data. T-CC wrote the first draft of the manuscript. Y-CF and J-SH revised and reorganised the manuscript extensively. All authors contributed to the interpreting the results and critically revising the manuscript for important intellectual content and approved the final version of the manuscript.
Funding This research was supported by grants from Academia Sinica, Taiwan (AS-103-TP-C03, AS-106-TP-C05).
Disclaimer The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent Obtained.
Ethics approval This study has been approved by the Institutional Review Board on Humanities and Social Science Research (IRB-HS), Academia Sinica (AS-IRB-HS 02–13022).
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement The data (https://figshare.com/s/f2223e95335f5dac44df; DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.5208703) and the codes (https://figshare.com/s/f7247dbcf3fade138859; DOI:10.6084/m9.figshare.5208706) used in this study are all public available from figshare.com.