Emotional selection (information)
Emotional selection describes the perpetuation and evolution of information based on its ability to evoke emotions.[1][2] The hypothesis posits that information spreads throughout populations not just based on their factual accuracy or utility, but also based on the emotional impact it has on recipients.
Overview
Emotional selection suggests that if a meme or a piece of information evokes strong emotions—whether positive or negative—it is more likely to be shared and propagated. The emotional response effectively acts as a selection mechanism, giving certain memes an advantage in the competition for attention and dissemination. This hypothesis underscores the importance of emotional resonance in the virality and longevity of information in cultural evolution.
Additionally researchers have developed coupled models that treat emotion and information as two interacting propagation processes in social media. Instead of tracking "information spread," these models examine how group emotions influence information thresholds and diffusion patterns. They found that group emotional atmosphere influences how quickly and how far information is spread and that positive or neutral emotions often become dominant over negative ones. Additionally, they found that denser networks intensify emotional differences during the spread.[3] Additional study on this topic has revealed emotional responses themselves can also predict how content spreads. High-arousal and positive emotional reactions correlated with stronger moral contagion and real-time emotional measures outperform self-reports in predicting spread.[4]
Researchers of social media are now using epidemic models (the same disease spread kind) to include emotional contagion dynamics. These models divide exposed platform-users into positive, negative, and neutral emotional states and simulate how each emotional state evolves alongside information. This research discovered that the emotional responses of "key opinion leaders" have disproportional effects on information flow and group emotional states.[5]
References
- ^ Heath, Chip; Bell, Chris; Sternberg, Emily (2001). "Emotional selection in memes: The case of urban legends". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 81 (6): 1028–1041. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.81.6.1028. PMID 11761305.
- ^ Eriksson, Kimmo; Coultas, Julie C.; de Barra, Mícheál (24 February 2016). "Cross-Cultural Differences in Emotional Selection on Transmission of Information". Journal of Cognition and Culture. 16 (1–2): 122–143. doi:10.1163/15685373-12342171.
- ^ Yan, Guanghui; Zhang, Xiaolong; Pei, Huayan; Li, Yuyao (2024-11-01). "An emotion-information spreading model in social media on multiplex networks". Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation. 138 108251. doi:10.1016/j.cnsns.2024.108251. ISSN 1007-5704.
- ^ Li, Rui; Liu, Xu; Yu, Yipeng; Su, Waxun; Hu, Yueqin (2026-01-01). "Beyond content: Multimodal emotional responses predict online moral contagion across laboratory and real-world contexts". International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. 208 103689. doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2025.103689. ISSN 1071-5819.
- ^ Chen, Hejie; Jin, Jiamin; Sun, Steven; Zhang, Chuyi; Yu, Minshan (2025-07-22). "Research on propagation dynamics of emotional contagion using S3EIR model based on multiple social media platforms". Frontiers in Communication. 10. doi:10.3389/fcomm.2025.1582974. ISSN 2297-900X.
