Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
People generally use social networks to connect with individuals who tend to post positive or success-oriented updates – unless they are in a bad mood, according to research scheduled for publication in the December edition of Computers in Human Behavior.
When social media users are in a negative mood, they are more likely to seek out people who appear to be doing even worse than they are: “the less attractive, less successful people on their social media sites,” study co-author of the study and Ohio State University communications professor Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick said in a statement.
The findings, Knobloch-Westerwick and fellow co-author Benjamin Johnson explained, additional context to recent research that has concluded that men and women who spend a lot of time on Facebook often feel more frustrated, angry and lonely. It was believed that this is the result of happy, upbeat updates from friends that make them feel inadequate in comparison, but the new study indicates that the mood of the user plays a major role.
Knobloch-Westerwick and Johnson, a former doctoral student in communication at Ohio State and now an assistant professor at VU University Amsterdam, recruited 168 college students and made sure they were in either a good mood or a bad one by having them complete a test on facial emotion recognition. Regardless of how they did, all of the participants were randomly praised or criticized for their performance on the examination.
Next, each of the individuals was asked to review what they were told was a brand new social media website known as SocialLink. The overview page of this supposed social network features profiles of eight individuals, designed to make the subjects of the profile appear to be either successful and attractive, or unsuccessful and unattractive.
Each profiled individual was ranked on a scale of 0 to 5 on both career success (represented by a number of dollar signs next to their profile) and attractiveness, or “hotness” (represented by the number of hearts next to the profile). Each profile had either half of a dollar sign (low career success) or 4 1/2 dollar signs (high career success), and likewise they each had either one-half heart (low attractiveness) or 4 1/2 hearts (high attractiveness).
The profile images of the supposed members were blurred out so that the study participants could not tell what the men and women actually looked like. The study participants were able to click on the profiles to learn more, and when they did, they discovered that all of the status updates were pretty much the same – relatively mundane and devoid of discussion of career success, academic achievement, physical appearance or romantic relationships.
“So the only real difference between the profiles was the ratings of career success and attractiveness signified by the dollar signs and hearts,” explained Johnson. The experiment revealed that people typically spent more time on the profiles of people who were rated as successful and attractive, but that those who had been put in a negative mood spent significantly more time than others browsing the profiles unsuccessful and unattractive people.
“If you need a self-esteem boost, you’re going to look at people worse off than you. You’re probably not going to be looking at the people who just got a great new job or just got married,” added Knobloch-Westerwick. “One of the great appeals of social network sites is that they allow people to manage their moods by choosing who they want to compare themselves to.”
——
Shop Amazon – Kindle Fire HDX – A Powerhouse Tablet Built for Work and Play
Comments