Earlier this year, a study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggested that Facebook was making its users sad. The authors of the paper, titled “Misery Has More Company Than People Think,” claimed that the constant barrage of positive depictions were making people feel inadequate, thus leading to depression.
But a new study from the University of Wisconsin is now indicating that there’s lots to dislike about this conclusion.
On the face of it, the original study makes sense. Everybody’s Facebook news feed is glimmering with positivity — whether it be your friends’ exciting vacation pics, glamorous graduation photos, or of course, their incessantly perpetual ability to only “like” things. The end result, as lead author Alexander Jordan noted, is that “people may think they are more alone in their emotional difficulties than they really are.”
But a recent study conducted by Lauren Jelenchick and Megan Moreno may have overturned this conclusion. They are claiming to have produced the first evidence that refutes the supposed link between depression and the amount of time spent on social networking sites like Facebook.
For those of us who are constantly connected to the web, it’s kind of nice to know that all that time spent social-networking may not really have been working against us all along.
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