CALLING IT QUITS ONLINE

perceived aggression), eating disorders and issues particular to high school students, working with the Greater Good Science Center at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley, the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and other academic partners.

New projects will assist in identifying suicide ideation in a friend’s posts and offer help connecting to resources for suicide prevention. There is a team working on how Facebook profiles can be managed after someone dies; another group has created safety checks, so friends and family can communicate quickly in a disaster.

Winters, Gregory Wells (clinical psychologist), Dan Muriello (engineer) and Emily Albert (product designer) were gathered to explain how the breakup flow came to be.

Albert, an ebullient 25-year-old who had been a classically trained ballet dancer before she attended the Rhode Island School of Design, described struggling with the digital legacy of a former boyfriend from college.

“I was seeing one post after another,” she said, “experiencing this thing that a lot of my friends have, where it’s almost impossible to separate when you’re constantly tied digitally. In one cathartic move toward empowerment, I thought, what if Facebook tried to tackle this?”

On the company shuttle home to San Francisco one evening, she floated an idea she had been working on to minimise that entanglement. How to digitally unmesh without choosing “the nuclear option” of unfriending or blocking someone? There was resounding encouragement, she said. “Heartbreak is a very common ailment here.”

Heartache and Facebook do go hand in hand.

There are studies that have examined the relationship between attachment styles and a tendency toward digital surveillance after a breakup on Facebook. There are studies that show a correlation between that digital surveillance — so-called Facebook stalking — and what’s known as obsessive relational intrusion, or the pursuit of intimacy with someone who doesn’t want to be pursued.

Some studies have found possible links between Facebook use and higher rates of