Seeing all the ‘good’ things in life for others is not too great.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Individuals who spend more time viewing Facebook and comparing what’s happening in their lives to the activities and accomplishments of their friends may run a higher risk of clinical depression, reveals a new study conducted at the University of Houston,.
Researcher Mai-Ly Steers presented her research on the topic in the article, “Seeing Everyone Else’s Highlight Reels: How Facebook Usage is Linked to Depressive Symptoms,” published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.
Steers conducted two studies to investigate how social comparison to peers on Facebook might impact users’ psychological health, and both studies provide evidence that Facebook users felt depressed when comparing themselves to others.
“It doesn’t mean Facebook causes depression, but that depressed feelings and lots of time on Facebook and comparing oneself to others tend to go hand in hand,” Steers told the University of Houston’s website.
“Most of your friends on Facebook are probably at least slightly more popular and more extroverted than you are, which means their curated, prettified Facebookified lives may appear richer, and more colorful than your own highlight reel,” noted Entrpeneur, before noting that doesn’t make anyone abnormal.
Daniel C. Feiler, a behavioral scientist and author his own Facebook-related study published in Psychological Science — the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology –advised that we need to consider when our social network is a biased sample and how that affects our social beliefs, since platforms like Facebook are likely to magnify the extraversion bias.
“One danger is that Facebook often gives us information about our friends that we are not normally privy to, which gives us even more opportunities to socially compare,” Steers further elaborated to the University of Houston school website.
“You can’t really control the impulse to compare because you never know what your friends are going to post. In addition, most of our Facebook friends tend to post about the good things that occur in their lives, while leaving out the bad. If we’re comparing ourselves to our friends’ ‘highlight reels,’ this may lead us to think their lives are better than they actually are and conversely, make us feel worse about our own lives,” she concluded.