Research ReportFacebook’s emotional consequences: Why Facebook causes a decrease in mood and why people still use it
Introduction
A couple of days after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had introduced the latest Facebook novelty in April 2013, Andy Borowitz from The New Yorker acerbically commented the event with the words “Facebook unveils new waste of time” (Borowitz, 2013). A similar position is taken by a ZDNet contributor, who referred to the new software as “another unnecessary distraction from what you should be doing” (Hess, 2013). Are these commentaries merely humorous presentations of personal opinions, or is there a deeper truth to them? More than one billion active Facebook users (Facebook, 2013) suggest that even if there is some truth to this notion, not many people are aware of it.
In fact, Facebook is the world’s most popular online social network (Nielsen, 2012). With the emergence and the success of such networks, a significant part of people’s social life has relocated to an online context. As a result, Facebook is an increasingly researched setting in psychology with regard to user demographics, motives that encourage Facebook use, or the activities people engage in (for a review, see Wilson, Gosling, & Graham, 2012). Note that only around 9% of users’ activities involve communication (Wise, Alhabash, & Park, 2010). Instead, Facebook activity consists mainly of non-interactive processes, such as directed or random consumption of social content. Such non-interactive Facebook behavior, however, is associated with reduced social capital and increased feelings of loneliness (Burke, Marlow, & Lento, 2010). Furthermore, consuming other people’s information, such as vacation photographs, was shown to evoke feelings of envy, which in turn had detrimental effects on life satisfaction (Krasnova, Wenninger, Widjaja, & Bruxmann, 2013). That is, the majority of the activities engaged in (i.e., passive consumption of social information) have rather negative outcomes for some its users.
Overall, however, with the rapid and exponential growth of online social networks within just one decade, knowledge about the psychological underpinnings and consequences of Facebook use remains scarce (cf., Wilson et al., 2012). Gosling (2009) has supposed that it may be triggered by the need for social grooming in a large environment. Considering the amount of passive consumption that occurs on Facebook, these speculations appear especially apt, as being up to date about other people’s lives constitutes an essential component of gossiping, a modern human version of social grooming (Dunbar, 2004). Other use functions may include staying in touch with friends, passing time, or relieving boredom (Lampe, Ellison, & Steinfield, 2008). Although many motives are yet to be identified, the large number of active users demonstrates that the motivational compound underlying Facebook is certainly powerful (Wilson et al., 2012). What does this imply for the potential consequences of Facebook use? There are evidently several components that drive people to regularly use the network, but does succumbing to those drives necessarily result in a state of content for users? Surprisingly, it has not yet been documented how Facebook activity affects users’ emotional states. Wise et al. (2010) conducted simultaneous physiological measures of pleasantness during Facebook use, but distinguished only between directed (e.g., a certain friend’s profile) and arbitrary (e.g., news feed) information seeking without relating those activities to others such as communication or Facebook-unrelated Internet activities.
Section snippets
The present research
With the present set of studies, we took a social psychological approach to explore the immediate emotional effects of Facebook use. Based on the findings outlined here, it seems likely that Facebook use results in negative emotional states. It is, we suggest, well conceivable that although Facebook may be triggered by basic human needs (e.g., need for social grooming) or adverse states such as boredom or loneliness, it entails side effects that curb one’s happiness. Specifically, we
Participants
A total of 123 German-speaking Facebook users (72 males; MAge = 22.11, SD = 2.87) completed a 3-min online survey. They were recruited through a link published on the Facebook account of a research assistant.
Materials and procedure
To examine the correlation between time spent on Facebook and current mood, it was necessary to recruit people with a Facebook account who had been using the network immediately prior to completing the survey. Therefore, the survey link was posted directly via the online social network itself.
Study 2
Does Facebook dampen one’s mood or does a bad mood encourage Facebook activity? Because a correlational design has been employed in Study 1, we could not pit off both explanations. In Study 2, we therefore examined the direction of causality by employing an experimental design. Moreover, we aimed to ensure that Facebook use in particular, and not any other online activity, causes a decrease in one’s emotional well-being. Thus, we contrasted a Facebook condition with a browsing control and a
Study 3
Affective forecasting errors denote a discrepancy between the expected and actual personal emotional state after a certain event (e.g., taking revenge). Accordingly, after having assessed users’ actual mood in Studies 1 and 2, we now wanted to find out what users expect to feel like after Facebook use. We predicted that people would wrongly anticipate that after 20 min on Facebook they would feel better than before, thereby committing a forecasting error.
General discussion
To our knowledge, the three studies reported here are the first to investigate the relation between Facebook activity and users’ emotional state. Whereas our first study provided correlational evidence for the notion that Facebook negatively affects users’ mood, the second study established a causal relationship between spending time on Facebook and negative mood immediately afterwards. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that this mood decline occurs because people feel like they wasted time and
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Natascha Bonosevich, Christian Epple, Georg Griesser, and Kathrin Wieden for their help in collecting data for Study 1.
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