| It goes without saying that the world of social media has made us just a touch more narcissistic. With selfies and self congratulatory statuses we have just about come to terms with the idea that we're all filtering our lives for the benefit of our dedicated social following (Hi, Mum!) But beyond that, is it actually manipulating our mood? I'm not just talking about plain old annoyance at the amount of candy crush invites or the flurry of engagement announcements – which I admit is phone-smashingly irritating. Unless you have been avoiding the news and um, your Facebook newsfeed, you will have seen that over the past few days the social network has admitted conducting a psychological experiment on more than 700,000 unsuspecting users. For one week in 2012, Facebook skewed the newsfeeds of 'participants' by showing either 'happier' or 'sadder' posts than normal whilst recording the effect this had on their own social behaviours. The results apparently showed that 'emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.' I'm not going to get into how creepy and wrong that is (FOR SHAME, MARK ZUCKERBERG) instead what I want to know is while the study was of course intrusive, are the results a wake up call for us all? I currently have 904 friends on Facebook. Aside from looking incredibly popular this also makes me look like a fraud to anyone that knows me. I can count my real friends on one hand, ok maybe two hands, but certainly not 181 (I did the math) The point being, none of those 10 BBFs or immediate family members stress me out on my nightly Facebook stalk. And when I'm scrolling through endless and essentially meaningless updates from the friend of a friend's Aunty about her IBS and relationship issues, is it really something I can block out or is it actually affecting my mood? So, what do you think? Should we be saying thank you to Facebook, for trying to manipulate our emotions? In being so creepy, they've actually made us rethink who we choose to 'friend' on Facebook…or have they just unwittingly brought us one step close to reaching for the 'deactivation' button? | 
