Michigan University. US: Using Facebook only to scroll through your news feed or browse other
people's profiles can have a negative impact on your well-being, says a
University of Michigan researcher.
Ethan Kross, U-M associate professor of psychology, and colleague
Philippe Verduyn of the University of Leuven in Belgium, examined how
passive versus active Facebook use affects users.
The findings, which appear in the current issue of the Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General, elaborate on the researchers' earlier
work about how increased Facebook use, overall, leads to declines in
people's well-being.
In the current work, Kross and Verduyn completed two studies: one
laboratory experiment, which allowed the researchers to draw inferences
about cause and effect, and one experience sampling study, which allowed
them to examine how Facebook use undermines emotional well-being in
daily life over time.
Across both studies, they found that passive use of Facebook leads to
consistent declines in how good people feel over time, mainly by
increasing feelings of envy toward others.
Interestingly, people spend most of their time passively using
Facebook, rather than being more active—posting status updates,
responding to other people's posts and chatting—which has no
implications for people's well-being.
"These findings help illuminate how using Facebook undermines the way
people feel," said Ethan Kross, the study's senior author who is an
associate professor of psychology and faculty associate at the Institute
for Social Research. "They also provide people with a blueprint for how
to reduce the negative effects that interacting with this technology
may have on the way people feel."
The first study involved about 80 undergraduate students. They were
instructed to use Facebook actively or passively for 10 minutes in a
controlled lab environment. When students passively used Facebook, they
felt significantly worse at the end of the day. This was not the case
for the student who used Facebook actively.
In the second study, the researchers examined whether passive
Facebook use predicted similar outcomes when people engaged in this
behavior spontaneously in daily life. About 80 undergraduate students
were text messaged five times a day over six consecutive days.
Each text message contained a link to an online questionnaire that
asked them to complete a series of questions to gauge their emotions and
assess how frequently they used Facebook passively versus actively.
Passive Facebook use predicted increases in envy, which in turn
predicted declines in how good people felt over time. Active Facebook
usage did not.
There was a silver lining to the second study. Directly replicating
their prior findings on this topic, the authors found that the more
people interacted directly with other people "offline," the more their
moods improved from one moment to the next.
The researchers noted that the findings raise a question about why
people continue to passively use Facebook if it negatively affects how
they feel over time. The data did not address this question, but the
researchers had at least one explanation for this phenomenon.
"It is possible that people's motivation to 'stay in touch' outweigh
concerns they have over how interacting with this technology influences
their feelings," said lead author Philippe Verduyn of the University of
Leuven.
Co-authors of the study are U-M researchers David Seungjae Lee,
Jiyoung Park, David Seungjae Lee, Ariana Orvell, Holly Shablack, Joseph
Bayer, John Jonides and Oscar Ybarra.