Emotional Utility and Recall of the Facebook News Feed

We report a laboratory study (N=53) in which participants browsed their own Facebook news feeds for 10-15 minutes, choosing exactly when to quit, and later rated the overall emotional utility of the episode before attempting to recall threads. Finally, the emotional utility of each encountered thread was rated while looking over a recording of the interaction. We report that Facebook browsing was, overall, an emotionally positive experience; that recall of threads exhibited classic primacy and recency serial order effects; that recalled threads were both more positive and more valenced (less neutral) on average, than forgotten threads; and that overall emotional valence judgments were predicted, statistically, by the peak and end thread judgments. We find no evidence that local quit decisions were driven by the emotional utility of threads. In the light of these findings, we discuss the suggestion that emotional utility might partly explain the attractiveness of reading the news feed, and that an emotional memory bias might further increase the attractiveness of the newsfeed in prospect.