When in a bad mood, people tend to use social networking sites such as Facebook to find someone who's feeling worse than them, a new study finds.
The study was conducted by researchers from The Ohio State University. The researchers noted that most people use social media to connect with people who are posting positive and success-oriented updates.
"But when people are in a negative mood, they start to show more interest in the less attractive, less successful people on their social media sites," said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, co-author of the study and professor of communication at The Ohio State University. in a press statement.
This study supports previous studies that found that people who spend a lot of time on social networking sites are generally more angry, lonely and frustrated because of all the happy updates they read from friends, which make them feel inadequate.
"People have the ability to manage how they use social media," said Benjamin Johnson, co-author of the study, recently a doctoral student in communication at Ohio State and now an assistant professor at VU University Amsterdam. "Generally, most of us look for the positive on social media sites. But if you're feeling vulnerable, you'll look for people on Facebook who are having a bad day or who aren't as good at presenting themselves positively, just to make yourself feel better."
For the study, researchers divided 168 college students into two groups. They were made to take a test on facial emotion recognition. Regardless of their answers, the students were randomly told their performance was "terrible" (to put them in a bad mood) or "excellent" (to put them in a good mood).
Following this, participants were asked to review what they were told was a new social networking site called SocialLink. The overview page presented preview profiles of eight individuals, which the students could click on to read more.
The profiles was ranked on a scale of 0 to 5 based on career success and attractiveness (marked by dollar signs) and hotness (marked by hearts). All profiles were blurred so that participants didn't know what they actually looked like. When participants clicked on the profiles, they found that all the status updates were much the same. They were all relatively mundane and didn't discuss any career or academic success, 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," Johnson said.
Researchers noted that participants generally tended to spend more time on profiles that were ranked high on the bases of career success and attractiveness. Contrarily, those that had been put in a negative mood spent significantly more time than others browsing the profiles of people who had been rated as unsuccessful and unattractive.
"If you need a self-esteem boost, you're going to look at people worse off than you," Knobloch-Westerwick said. "You're probably not going to be looking at the people who just got a great new job or just got married. 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."
The study was published online in the journal Computers in Human Behavior
