Changing how you interact with social media may alleviate its negative effects.
Spending a lot of time on Facebook is linked to diminished well-being, according to many studies. Yet questions linger about cause and effect – perhaps people who are already lonely simply spend more time on social media. New studies reveal that Facebook can indeed affect mood and mental state, and whether the effect is positive or negative depends heavily on how a person interacts with his or her contacts. Several of the new findings reveal that when Facebook hurts, the underlying culprit is – you guessed it – envy.
A study published in February 2015 in Computers in Human Behavior surveyed 736 college students and found that when Facebook evoked envy, it increased symptoms of depression. But a March 2015 study from the same journal found that Facebook use can actually decrease depression if users sign on seeking social connection and support and then feel they have received it. Other studies have found that the way a user interacts with Facebook may be crucial. Researchers at the University of Michigan and KU Leuven in Belgium tracked 173 students’ habits over time and found that passive use – browsing news feeds, for example – led to reduced well-being by increasing feelings of envy. Active use, such as posting and commenting had no such effect.
Another important factor seems to be how close you are to the people with whom you interact. Two related experiments published in November 2015 in Computers in Human Behavior were the first to explore the role of relationship strength in users’ emotional responses to posts on the site. The researchers found that people more often people more often felt positive emotions than negative ones when browsing the site, and their emotions were amplified when reading posts from someone they knew well.
“Empathy is more pronounced when the relationship is closer, so one is more likely to ‘catch’ the happiness of a close friend than a casual acquaintance,” says study co-author Ruoyun Lin, a doctoral student at the Leibniz Institute’s Knowledge Media Research Center in Tubingen, Germany. Close friends can inspire envy, too, but the researchers found that this type of envy tended to be benign – the overall reaction to a friend’s good news was usually positive.
The takeaway, the experts say, is that you can control how Facebook makes you feel. If you tend to compare yourself with others or get envious easily, you might consider limiting your time on social-networking sites or make a conscious effort to use them in active rather than passive ways. “Our findings show the importance of human agency,” says Edson C. Tandoc, Jr., co-author of the February 2015 study and assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. “It’s not technology such as Facebook that affects our feelings per se but rather how we use it.”
Scientific American Mind
March/April 2016