Social networks bring loneliness or happiness

In exploring the question of how Facebook affects people's emotional state, different studies have drawn different and even contradictory conclusions. To understand this, we might as well start by studying what people do when they go to Facebook. In theory, Facebook-registered people don't want to be pathetic and lonely, but a recent study by Issan Cross, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, dismissed the idea. Facebook is making us more and more lonely and pathetic, according to research. The preliminary work of Cross's study was to send 5 survey information to 82 residents of the city of Fort Anna in two weeks. The main content of the survey was the overall mood of the object, how worried and lonely they were, how much they were using Facebook, and how many times they had been face-to-face with others from the time they received a message. The results showed the more unhappy the study subjects were with Facebook, the less the overall satisfaction from the beginning to the end of the two texts. According to the data, Facebook is making users unhappy.

Studies that have alienated the Internet, especially Facebook, have supported Cross's conclusions. In 1998, Robert Kraut, a researcher at the University of Mellon, found that the more people surfed the Internet, the more they felt lonely and frustrated. In a year or two after the first Internet connection, the higher the frequency of their internet use, the lower their sense of well-being and their relationships with people around them.

More lonely people are not more likely to surf the internet, a recent literature review of 75 studies concludes that "people who use Facebook don't have much of a difference in personality traits from Facebook." But for some reason, the internet has made users feel more alienated from others. A review, written in 2010, analyses 40 research subjects and confirms the trend: the use of the Internet has a small but statistically significant adverse effect on the overall health of the person. One experiment concludes that Facebook triggers jealousy and leads to emotional problems.

Another team suggested that using Facebook would also boost jealousy: the more people spend more time browsing Facebook than sending original information or interacting with content on Facebook, the more jealous they feel. Hanna Krasnov (Hanna Krasnova) and colleagues believe that this is the result of "social contrast effects" in social psychology. The contrast has become more apparent because people are more likely to associate with people of similar size: they know that their achievements can be even more devastating because they are peers with similar thinking styles. Recently, psychologist Besse Anderson (Beth Anderson) and colleagues, after assessing Facebook's impact, believe that using Facebook can quickly become addictive, as well as create irritating negative energy, which can make users hate social networks, Some annoying reasons are the same as the reason for registering Facebook. We want to know about others, and we want people to know us--but in this mutual understanding, we may begin to resent each other's lives and begin to resent the image we feel we need to keep. Samuel Goslin Samuel Gosling, a psychologist who specializes in the use of social media and social networking, said: "It is likely that the very first thing that is attractive at the outset is to avoid it." ”

But like other findings about Facebook, the opposite is true. In 2009, Sebastian Valenzuela (Sebastián Valenzuela) and his colleagues drew the opposite conclusion: Facebook made us happier. They also found that Facebook was able to raise social trust, promote social interaction and even encourage people to participate in political activities. Valenzuela's findings are very much in line with social psychologists ' long-standing social awareness. "Social networking is a way we share with others," Matthew Lieberman in his book "Social:why Our brains are Wired to Connect". After successful sharing, psychological and physical gratification often acts as self-motivation. The spread of social media has fundamentally changed the way we read and look at things: when we consume information, we think about how and who to share it with. Even before sharing information, the idea of successful sharing can activate our reward processing hub.

Virtual social connections can even cushion stress and pain: Matthew Lieberman and colleagues in 2009 showed that when women are stimulated by pain, holding a boyfriend's hand or seeing a photo of a boyfriend can relieve pain, and the effect of the photo paralysis pain is one-fold stronger than the physical contact. "Forced Imagination" is the embodiment of real things, psychologists Wendi Gadna (Wendi Gardner) and Sindi Pickett (Cindy Pickett) call them "social snacks". For some unknown reason, distance factors and forced imaginations have anesthetic effects, and we may expect this effect to be extended to all friends on social networks.

Virtual social connections can cushion stress and pain, and seeing a boyfriend's photos can ease a woman's pain, and we may be hoping for a forced-imagined paralysis that can also be extended to photos of all friends on social networks. Image source: Aimee LEE Ball,nytimes.com

These are all trustworthy studies, but they come to different and even contradictory conclusions about how Facebook affects people's emotional state. To understand this, we can focus on what people are doing when they go to Facebook.

"The problem is so complicated because Facebook can do a lot of things and different people are using Facebook to do a series of different things," said Samuel Goslin, a psychologist who studies the use of social media and shared motivations for social networks. Not only that, they also cause change, because people are changing themselves. "In 2010, a Mellon University project found that if people interacted directly with others (leaving messages to each other, sending letters or" liking "a message), their sense of social contact and social capital had improved and their loneliness had fallen. However, if the participants only passively digest news content, Facebook has the opposite effect of reducing the sense of contact with others and increasing loneliness.

Psychologists at the University of Missouri have also measured the physiological performance of the effect. In the experiment, 4 electrodes were glued to the upper end of the eyebrow and the lower part of the eye to record facial expressions, a method known as facial electromyography. When they were actively interacting with Facebook, they measured a significant increase in their sense of well-being from their physiological responses, and when viewed passively, the effect disappeared.

John Eastwood, of the University of York, and colleagues in the first half of this year John Ister the findings, and they wrote an integration analysis of "boredom". What makes us feel bored and unhappy? The answer is attention. We don't get bored when we focus, and boredom comes when we don't focus. Eastwood's research and recent research on media multitasking have shown that the more we focus on tasks, the more difficult it is to stay focused on everything and become more and more distracted.

In other words, the kind of continuous online and media world that Facebook represents is an enemy of social networks. Every topic that divides Facebook's use into active and passive research finds that, on average, users spend more time passively browsing new things than actively producing content and interacting with other users. This may explain why the study of Facebook's overall use has always come to the conclusion that "Facebook has a negative impact on sentiment", such as the study of the people of Ann Arbor. Because of the need to focus on other things, we are more likely to be passive rather than active with Facebook. No matter what the media, the passive experience will turn into disjointed and boring feelings.

Timothy Wilson, a psychologist, told me that his study found that college students who had lost their cell phones or computers were "crazy" just a few minutes in the room. Wilson said, "Maybe you think we can amuse ourselves with this time, but we can't." We've forgotten what to do. "As long as we have leisure, the internet is a very tempting solution to fill the void quickly." We're bored, brush Facebook or Twitter, and get bored. The fact that Facebook does not change is that we forget more and more about how to focus properly and meaningfully. From this point of view, Facebook is not a problem. Symptoms are.