Have you ever wondered why your friend - or maybe you - are always compulsed to "like" videos of fluffy animals or snoop on an old friend's page of Facebook?
A new study found that these compulsive urges of some Facebook users have similar brain patterns as drug addicts.
A team of researchers issued 20 undergraduate students a questionnaire that gauged addiction-type symptoms associated with Facebook use - including withdrawal, anxiety and conflict over the site.
After that, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the participants' brains while they looked at a series of computer images. The students were told to either press or not press a button in response to the images, which included some Facebook logos and neutral traffic signs, reported Live Science.
The researchers found that the higher a student scored on the survey, the more likely they were to like a picture of a cat on the social media site.
Study co-author Ofir Turel, a psychologist at California State University, Fullerton, told Live Science these results indicate that if you're driving on a street next to someone who has a compulsive relationship with Facebook, they are "going to respond faster to beeps from their cellphone than to street signs."
"That's the power of Facebook," he added.
Study participants who appeared to be "addicted" to Facebook showed greater activation of their amygdala and striatum - the brain regions that are involved in impulsive behavior, Live Science reported.
The study was published in the journal Psychological Reports: Disability and Trauma.
