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Although social media plays an increasingly important role in communication around the world, social media research has primarily focused on Western users. Thus, little is known about how cultural values shape social media behavior. To examine how cultural affective values might influence social media use, we developed a new sentiment analysis tool that allowed us to compare the affective content of Twitter posts in the United States (55,867 tweets, 1,888 users) and Japan (63,863 tweets, 1,825 users). Consistent with their respective cultural affective values, U.S. users primarily produced positive (vs. negative) posts, whereas Japanese users primarily produced low (vs. high) arousal posts. Contrary to cultural affective values, however, U.S. users were more influenced by changes in others' high arousal negative (e.g., angry) posts, whereas Japanese were more influenced by changes in others' high arousal positive (e.g., excited) posts. These patterns held after controlling for differences in baseline exposure to affective content, and across different topics. Together, these results suggest that across cultures, while social media users primarily produce content that supports their affective values, they are more influenced by content that violates those values. These findings have implications for theories about which affective content spreads on social media, and for applications related to the optimal design and use of social media platforms around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon the literatures on beliefs about magical contagion and property transmission, we examined people's belief in a novel mechanism of human-to-human contagion, emotional residue. This is the lay belief that people's emotions leave traces in the physical environment, which can later influence others or be sensed by others. Studies 1-4 demonstrated that Indians are more likely than Americans to endorse a lay theory of emotions as substances that move in and out of the body, and to claim that they can sense emotional residue. However, when the belief in emotional residue is measured implicitly, both Indians and American believe to a similar extent that emotional residue influences the moods and behaviors of those who come into contact with it (Studies 5-7). Both Indians and Americans also believe that closer relationships and a larger number of people yield more detectable residue (Study 8). Finally, Study 9 demonstrated that beliefs about emotional residue can influence people's behaviors. Together, these finding suggest that emotional residue is likely to be an intuitive concept, one that people in different cultures acquire even without explicit instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]