Negative expressions are shared more on Twitter for public figures than for ordinary users.

Social media users tend to produce content that contains more positive than negative emotional language. However, negative emotional language is more likely to be shared. To understand why, research has thus far focused on psychological processes associated with tweets' content. In the current study, we investigate if the content producer influences the extent to which their negative content is shared. More specifically, we focus on a group of users that are central to the diffusion of content on social media-public figures. We found that an increase in negativity was associated with a stronger increase in sharing for public figures compared to ordinary users. This effect was explained by two user characteristics, the number of followers and thus the strength of ties and the proportion of political tweets. The results shed light on whose negativity is most viral, allowing future research to develop interventions aimed at mitigating overexposure to negative content.

Homophily and acrophily as drivers of political segregation.

Political segregation is an important social problem, increasing polarization and impeding effective governance. Previous work has viewed the central driver of segregation to be political homophily, the tendency to associate with others who have similar views. Here we propose that, in addition to homophily, people's social tie decisions are driven by political acrophily, the tendency to associate with others who have more extreme political views (rather than more moderate). We examined this using a paradigm in which participants share emotions and attitudes on political policies, observe others' responses and choose which others to affiliate with. In four studies (N = 1,235), both liberal and conservative participants' social tie decisions reflected the presence of acrophily. We found that participants who viewed peers who expressed more extreme views as more prototypical of their political group also tended to engage in greater acrophily. These studies identify a previously overlooked tendency in tie formation.

Amplification in the evaluation of multiple emotional expressions over time.

Social interactions are dynamic and unfold over time. To make sense of social interactions, people must aggregate sequential information into summary, global evaluations. But how do people do this? Here, to address this question, we conducted nine studies (N = 1,583) using a diverse set of stimuli. Our focus was a central aspect of social interaction-namely, the evaluation of others' emotional responses. The results suggest that when aggregating sequences of images and videos expressing varying degrees of emotion, perceivers overestimate the sequence's average emotional intensity. This tendency for overestimation is driven by stronger memory of more emotional expressions. A computational model supports this account and shows that amplification cannot be explained only by nonlinear perception of individual exemplars. Our results demonstrate an amplification effect in the perception of sequential emotional information, which may have implications for the many types of social interactions that involve repeated emotion estimation.

Negativity Spreads More than Positivity on Twitter After Both Positive and Negative Political Situations.

What type of emotional language spreads further in political discourses on social media? Previous research has focused on situations that primarily elicited negative emotions, showing that negative language tended to spread further. The current project extends existing knowledge by examining the spread of emotional language in response to both predominantly positive and negative political situations. In Study 1, we examined the spread of emotional language in tweets related to the winning and losing parties in the 2016 US elections, finding that increased negativity (but not positivity) predicted content sharing in both situations. In Study 2, we compared the spread of emotional language in two separate situations: the celebration of the US Supreme Court approval of same-sex marriage (positive) and the Ferguson unrest (negative), finding again that negativity spread further. These results shed light on the nature of political discourse and engagement. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00057-7.