LIKED – BUT NOT HAPPY Study shows social media can affect feelings
SAD Millennials have made seeking likes on Facebook a national sport – but it turns out it does nothing to cheer them up. Instead they might be broadcasting to their pals that they’ve low selfesteem and are vain and mistrusting.
Dr Martin Graff, of South Wales University, recruited 340 people from Twitter and Facebook to respond to personality questionnaires.
He asked how much they agreed or disagreed with 25 statements about how people appreciate being valued on social media.
“The proliferation of social media use has led to general concerns about the effects on our mental health,” Dr Graff said.
“Although this is just a relatively small-scale study, the results indicate that the ways we interact with social media can affect how we feel, and not always positively.”
Some people would take down posts that did not receive likes.
Others would swap their profile pictures if they went unpraised.
“They seemed to be quite concerned over that,” Dr Graff said.
“They wanted people to like it and if they didn’t receive any ‘likes’ people reported they would change it.”
Internet users also reported blindly accepting people making friend requests and agreeing with mates just to conform.
“It shows the way in which we live our lives through social media,” Dr Graff said.
“It’s here to stay and it is a big part of our lives. People do live their lives through social media.
“It is a way of conveying information to people who may be geographically distant. “People use it in all kinds of ways. “It’s a good thing if you have friends who live a long way away.”
Study participants had an average age of 27 but the oldest was in their 70s.
The findings were presented to the British Psychological Society this month.
It found men were more likely than women to make a concerted effort to stimulate likes.
They would ask friends, swap likes and even PAY to boost a post.
“We did find there were some gender differences,” Dr Graff said.
“Agreeing with things or accepting friend requests from people you did not know, males were more likely to do that than females.
“Things like trading and making a positive effort to get likes, males were more likely than females to do that.
“I don’t know how you might explain that away or whether it surprises me.”
The reader in psychology was most surprised by the length to which people went to manipulate profiles.
“That is, the way they behaved on Facebook and the fact they would change it and accept friend requests from people they did not know,” he said. Dr Graff insisted he was not a social media addict himself.
“I’m not an addict, but I do like it,” he said.
“There are people I would not have been able to keep in touch with without social media.”