The psychology of facebook

With over a billion users, Facebook is changing the social life of our species. Cultural commentators ponder the effects. Is it bringing us together or tearing us apart? Psychologists have responded too - Google Scholar lists more than 27,000 references with Facebook in the title. Common topics for study are links between Facebook use and personality, and whether the network alleviates or fosters loneliness. The torrent of new data is overwhelming and much of it appears contradictory. Here is the psychology of Facebook, digested:

Who uses Facebook?

Extraverts have more friends on FB
but shy people probably use it more

According to a survey of over a thousand people, "females, younger people, and those not currently in a committed relationship were the most active Facebook users". Regarding personality, a study of over 1000 Australians reported that "[FB] users tend to be more extraverted and narcissistic, but less conscientious and socially lonely, than nonusers". A study of the actual FB use of over a hundred students found that personality was a more important factor than gender and FB experience, with high scorers in neuroticism spending more time on FB. Meanwhile, extraverts were found to have more friends on the network than introverts ("the 10 per cent of our respondents scoring the highest in extraversion had, on average, 484 more friends than the 10 per cent scoring the lowest in extraversion").

Other findings add to the picture, for example: greater shyness has also been linked with more FB use. Similarly, a study from 2013 found that anxiousness (as well as alcohol and marijuana use) predicted more emotional attachment to Facebook.

There's also evidence that people use FB to connect with others with specialist interests, such as diabetes patients sharing information and experiences, and that people with autism particularly enjoy interacting via FB and other online networks.

Why do some people use Twitter and others Facebook?

High scorers in "need for cognition" prefer Twitter

Apparently most people use Facebook "to get instant communication and connection with their friends" (who knew?), but why use FB rather than Twitter? A 2014 paper suggested narcissism again is relevant, but that its influence depends on a person's age: student narcissists prefer Twitter, while more mature narcissists prefer FB. Other research has uncovered intriguing links between personality and reasons for using FB. People who said they used FB as an informational tool (rather than socialising) tended to score higher on neuroticism, sociability, extraversion and openness, but lower on conscientiousness and "need for cognition". The researchers speculated that using FB to seek and share information could be some people's way to avoid more cognitively demanding sources such as journal articles and newspaper reports. The same study also found that higher scorers in sociability, neuroticism and extraversion preferred FB, while people who scored higher in "need for cognition" preferred Twitter.

What do we give away about ourselves on Facebook?

FB seems like the perfect way to present an idealised version of yourself to the world. However an analysis of the profiles of over 200 people in Germany and the US found that they reflected their actual personalities, not their ideal selves. Consistent with this, another study found that people who are rated as more likeable in the flesh also tend to be rated as more likeable based on their Facebook page. The things you choose to "like" on FB are also revealing. Remarkably, a study out last week found that your "likes" can be analysed by a computer programme to produce a more accurate profile of your personality than the profiles produced by your friends and relatives.

If our FB profiles expose our true selves, this raises obvious privacy issues. A study in 2013 warned that employers often trawl candidates' FB pages, and that they view photos of drinking and partying as "red flags", presumably seeing them as a sign of low conscientiousness (in fact the study found photos like these were linked with high extraversion, not with low conscientiousness).

Other researchers have looked specifically at how personality is related to the kind of content people post on FB. A 2014 study reported that "higher degrees of narcissism led to deeper self-disclosures and more self-promotional content within these messages. [And] Users with higher need to belong disclosed more intimate information". Another study last year also reported that lonelier people disclose more private information, but fewer opinions.

You might also want to consider the friends you keep on FB - research suggests that their attractiveness (good-lookers give your rep a boost), and the statements they make about you on your wall, affect the way your own profile is perceived. Consider too how many friends you have - somewhat paradoxically, research finds that having an overabundance of friends leads to negative perceptions of your profile.

Finally, we heard about employers frowning on partying photos, but what else do you give away in your FB profile picture? It could reveal your cultural background according to a 2012 study that showed people from Taiwan were more likely to have a zoomed-out picture in which they were seen against a background context, while US users were more likely to have a close-up picture in which their face filled up more of the frame. Your FB pic might also say something about your current romantic relationship. When people feel more insecure about their partner's feelings, they make their relationship more visible in their pics.

In case you're wondering, yes, people who post more selfies probably are more narcissistic.

Is Facebook making us lonely and sad?

This is the crunch question that has probably attracted the most newspaper column inches (and books). A 2012 study took an experimental approach. One group were asked to post more updates than usual for one week - this led them to feel less lonely and more connected to their friends. Similarly, a survey of over a thousand FB users found links between use of the network and greater feelings of belonging and confidence in keeping up with friends, especially for people with low self-esteem. Another study from 2010 found that shy students who use FB feel closer to their friends (on FB) and have a greater sense of social support. A similar story is told by a 2013 paper that said feelings of FB connectedness were associated with "with lower depression and anxiety and greater satisfaction with life" and that Facebook "may act as a separate social medium ....  with a range of positive psychological outcomes." This recent report also suggested the site can help revive old relationships.

Yet there's also evidence for the negative influence of FB. A 2013 study texted people through the day, to see how they felt before and after using FB. "The more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt the next time we text-messaged them; [and] the more they used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time," the researchers said.

Other findings are more nuanced. This study from 2010 (not specifically focused on FB) found that using the internet to connect with existing friends was associated with less loneliness, but using it to connect with strangers (i.e. people only known online) was associated with more loneliness. This survey of adults with autism found that greater use of online social networking (including FB) was associated with having more close friendships, but only offline relationships were linked with feeling less lonely.

Facebook could also be fuelling envy. In 2012 researchers found that people who'd spent more time on FB felt that other people were happier, and that life was less fair. Similarly, a study of hundreds of undergrads found that more time on FB went hand in hand with more feelings of jealousy. And a paper from last year concluded that "people feel depressed after spending a great deal of time on Facebook because they feel badly when comparing themselves to others." However, this new report (on general online social networking, not just FB) found that heavy users are not more stressed than average, but are more aware of other people's stress.

Is Facebook harming students' academic work?

This is another live issue among newspaper columnists and other social commentators. An analysis of the grades and FB use of nearly 4000 US students found that the more they used the network to socialise, the poorer their grades tended to be (of course, there could be a separate causal factor(s) underlying this association). But not all FB use is the same - the study found that using the site to collect and share information was actually associated with better grades. This survey of over 200 students also found that heavier users of FB tend to have lower academic grades, but note again that this doesn't prove a causal link. Yet another study, this one from the University of Chicago, which included more convincing longitudinal data, found no evidence for a link between FB use and poorer grades; if anything there were signs of the opposite pattern. Still more positive evidence for FB came from a recent report that suggested FB - along with other social networking tools - could have cognitive benefits for elderly people.

And finally, some miscellaneous findings

• These are the unwritten rules of Facebook, according to focus groups with students.
• Viewing your own FB profile boosts self-esteem.
• Emotions are contagious on Facebook (this is the recent study that caused controversy because users' feeds were manipulated without them knowing). 
• Surprise! Both male and female subjects are more willing to initiate friendships with opposite-sex profile owners with attractive photos.
• People publish posts on FB that they later regret for various reasons, including posting when they're in an emotional state or misunderstanding their online social circles. 
• Who needs cheap thrills or meditation? Apparently, looking at your FB account is different, physiologically speaking, from stress or relaxation. It provokes what these researchers describe appealingly as a "core flow state", characterised by positive mood and high arousal. 

That was our digest of the psychology of Facebook - please tell all your friends, on and off Facebook! Oh, and don't forget to visit the Research Digest Facebook page.
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

New reason why quitting smoking is so difficult

When a cigarette smoker attempts to quit, not only do they crave their usual nicotine hit, they also experience an unpleasant inability to enjoy other pleasures in life - a state known as "anhedonia".

Jessica Cook and her colleagues studied over a thousand smokers enrolled on a quitting programme in the US. The participants (mostly White, 58.3 per cent were female) were placed on a range of nicotine replacement therapies or they were given placebo. The participants also kept an evening diary from five days before, to ten days after, their quit day. Here they recorded how much pleasure they'd experienced that day across three domains: social, recreation and performance/accomplishment.

The researchers found that stopping smoking was followed by an immediate spike in anhedonia - on the day of quitting, participants in the placebo condition showed a marked reduction in their experience of pleasure from various aspects of life. This quitting-related anhedonia peaked the day after quitting and showed all the hallmarks of being part of the nicotine "withdrawal syndrome". That is, levels of anhedonia tended to be correlated with other withdrawal symptoms (such as craving and poor concentration); the anhedonia faded over time; and it was eased by the administration of a nicotine therapy, such as a nicotine lozenge or patch.

Perhaps most importantly, the results showed that levels of anhedonia were correlated (negatively) with participants' subsequent success at abstinence, even after controlling for the predictive value of craving levels and negative mood. In other words, more quitting-related anhedonia was associated with less success at quitting. Greater post-quitting anhedonia also predicted increased risk of an initial lapse transforming into a full return to smoking. It seems likely that quitting-related anhedonia prompts smokers to want to resume smoking so that they can reinstate their usual ability to enjoy other pleasures in life; and once they lapse, the return of the smoker's usual experience of pleasure acts as a powerful reinforcer.

"The present study is the first, to our knowledge, to demonstrate that post-cessation pleasure in response to daily activities is a significant barrier to quitting smoking," the researchers said. They added that this could point to important new treatment strategies aimed at helping smokers get through their initial experience of anhedonia (such as "behavioural activation"), especially smokers with other mental health issues, who may use smoking to self-treat their chronic anhedonia.

The study makes a useful contribution to the field, but it does suffer some limitations, as the researchers acknowledged. This includes the reliance on the participants' rather vague reports of their daily enjoyment of activities, as well as the fact the sample was enrolled on a treatment programme and highly motivated to quit - it remains to be seen how well the findings will generalise.
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  Cook, J., Piper, M., Leventhal, A., Schlam, T., Fiore, M., & Baker, T. (2014). Anhedonia as a Component of the Tobacco Withdrawal Syndrome. Journal of Abnormal Psychology DOI: 10.1037/abn0000016

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Is being a worrier a sign of intelligence?

We usually see worry as a bad thing. It feels unpleasant, like a snake coiling in the pit of your stomach. And worriers are often considered weak links in a team - negative influences who lack confidence. But of course, anxiety has a useful function. It's about anticipating and preparing for threats, and learning from past mistakes.

Increasingly psychologists are recognising the strengths of anxious people. For example, there's research showing that people more prone to anxiety are quicker to detect threats and better at lie detection. Now Alexander Penney and his colleagues have conducted a survey of over 100 students and they report that a tendency to worry goes hand in hand with higher intelligence.

The researchers asked the students to complete measures of worry, anxiety, depression, rumination, social phobia, dwelling on past social events, mood, verbal intelligence, non-verbal intelligence, and test anxiety. This last measure was important because the researchers wanted to distinguish trait anxiety from in-the-moment state anxiety and how each relates to intelligence.

The key finding was that after controlling for the influence of test anxiety and current mood, the students who reported a general habit of worrying more (e.g. they agreed with survey statements like "I am always worrying about something") and/or ruminating more (e.g. they said they tended to think about their sadness, or think "what am doing to deserve this?") also tended to score higher on the test of verbal intelligence, which was taken from the well-known Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.

To take one specific statistical example, verbal intelligence correlated positively with worry proneness with a statistically significant value of 0.19 (after controlling for test anxiety and mood). Together with the measures of rumination, mood and test anxiety, verbal intelligence explained an estimated 46 per cent of the variance in worry.

Another result from the survey, not so promising for worriers, was that a tendency to dwell on past social events was negatively correlated with non-verbal intelligence (that is, those students who dwelt more on past events scored lower on non-verbal IQ).

Seeking to explain these two different and seemingly contradictory correlations, the researchers surmised that: "more verbally intelligent individuals are able to consider past and future events in greater detail, leading to more intense rumination and worry. Individuals with high non-verbal intelligence may be stronger at processing the non-verbal signals they interact with in the moment, leading to a decreased need to re-process past social encounters."

Of course we must be careful not to over-interpret these preliminary results - it was a small, non-clinical sample after all, so it's not clear how the findings would generalise to people with more extreme anxiety. However it's notable that a small 2012 study found a correlation between worry and intelligence in a sample diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder. Penney and his colleagues concluded that: "a worrying and ruminating mind is a more verbally intelligent mind; a socially ruminative mind, however, might be less able to process non-verbal information."

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Penney, A., Miedema, V., & Mazmanian, D. (2015). Intelligence and emotional disorders: Is the worrying and ruminating mind a more intelligent mind? Personality and Individual Differences, 74, 90-93 DOI

Loneliness changes the structure and function of the brain

Loneliness increases the risk of poor sleep, higher blood pressure, cognitive and immune decline, depression, and ultimately an earlier death. Why? The traditional explanation is that lonely people lack life’s advisors: people who encourage healthy behaviours and curb unhealthy ones. If so, we should invest in pamphlets, adverts and GP advice: ignorance is the true disease, loneliness just a symptom.

But this can’t be the full story. Introverts with small networks aren’t at especial health risk, and people with an objectively full social life can feel lonely and suffer the consequences. A new review argues that for the 800,000 UK citizens who experience it all or most of the time, loneliness itself is the disease: it directly alters our perception, our thoughts, and the very structure and chemistry of our brains. The authors – loneliness expert John Cacioppo, his wife Stephanie Cacioppo, and their colleague John Capitanio – build their case on psychological and neuroscientific research, together with animal studies that help show loneliness really is the cause, not just the consequence, of various mental and physical effects.

The review suggests lonely people are sensitive to negative social outcomes and accordingly their responses in social settings are dampened. We know the former from reaction time tasks involving negative social words (lonely people respond faster), and tasks involving the detection of concealed pain in faces (lonely people are extra sensitive when the faces are dislikeable). Functional imaging evidence also shows lonely people have a suppressed neural response to rewarding social stimuli, which reduces their excitement about possible social contact; they also have dampened activity in brain areas involved in predicting what others are thinking – possibly a defence mechanism based on the idea that it’s better not to know. All this adds up to what the authors characterise as a social "self-preservation mode."

Meanwhile, animal models are helping us to understand the deeper, biological correlates associated with loneliness. For mice, being raised in isolation depletes key neurosteroids including one involved in aggression; it reduces brain myelination, which is vital to brain plasticity and may account for the social withdrawal and inflexibility seen in isolated animals; and it can influence gene expression linked to anxious behaviours.

What about changes to our neural tissue? Human research is suggestive: in one study, people who self-identified as lonelier were more likely to develop dementia. Here, initial cognitive decline could be causing loneliness, but animal work gives us some plausible mechanisms for loneliness’ impact: animals kept in isolation have suppressed growth of new neurons in areas relating to communication and memory, just as very social periods such as breeding season see a pronounced spike in growth.

Other basic brain processes are also upset by isolation. Isolated mice show reduced delta-wave activity during deep sleep; and their inflammatory responses also change, meaning that in one study, three in five isolated mice died following an induced stroke, whereas every one of their cage-sharing peers survived the same process.

The research is clear that loneliness directly impacts health, so we need to do what we can to help people free themselves from social marginalisation. I’ve seen one approach during my time serving with time banking charities, in which people give their own time in return for someone else’s in a different situation – a process that can build social networks. Also the issue is acquiring momentum through the Campaign to End Loneliness and technology solutions such as the RSA’s Social Mirror project – an app that tells people about local social groups and activities. Mainstream health is also picking this up under the term “social prescription” (physicians advise patients of social groups and activities and “facilitators” help the patients take up the opportunities). But amongst all the institutional activity, we mustn’t forget our individual duties: sometimes all that’s needed is to reach out.

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Cacioppo, S., Capitanio, J., & Cacioppo, J. (2014). Toward a neurology of loneliness. Psychological Bulletin, 140 (6), 1464-1504 DOI: 10.1037/a0037618

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

New sleep research

For many years psychologists have divided people into two types based on their sleeping habits. There are Larks who rise early, feel sprightly in the morning, and retire to bed early; and Owls, who do the opposite, preferring to get up late and who come alive in the evening.

Have you ever thought that you don't fit either pattern; that you're neither a morning nor evening person? Even in good health, maybe you feel sluggish most of the time, or conversely, perhaps you feel high energy in the morning and evening. If so, you'll relate to a new study published by Arcady Putilov and his colleagues at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The researchers invited 130 healthy people (54 men) to a sleep lab and kept them awake for just over 24 hours. The participants were asked to refrain from coffee and alcohol, and several times during their stay they filled out questionnaires about how wakeful or dozy they were feeling. They also answered questions about their sleep patterns and wakeful functioning during the preceding week.

By analysing the participants' energy levels through the 24 period and their reports about their functioning during the previous week, Putilov and his team identified four distinct groups. Consistent with past research, there were Larks (29 of them), who showed higher energy levels on the first and second mornings at 9AM, but lower levels when tested at 9PM and midnight; and there were Owls (44 of them), who showed the opposite pattern. The Larks also reported rising earlier and going to bed earlier through the previous week, whereas the Owls showed the opposite pattern. There was an average two-hour difference between the sleep and wake cycles of these two groups.

The researchers also identified two further chronotypes. There was a "high energetic" group of 25 people who reported feeling relatively sprightly in both the morning and evening; and a "lethargic" group of 32 others, who described feeling relatively dozy in both the morning and evening. Unlike the Owls and Larks, these two groups didn't show differences in terms of their time to bed and time of waking - their habits tended to lie mid-way between the Larks and Owls.

The researchers said their results support the idea of there being "four diurnal types, and each of these types can ... be differentiated from any of three other types on self-scorings of alertness-sleepiness levels in the course of 24-hours sleep deprivation."

We already have bird names for morning and evening people - Owls and Larks. Part of the title of this new paper is "A search for two further 'bird species'". I was hoping the authors might propose two new bird names for their high energy and lethargic categories, but sadly they don't. What about Swift for the high energy category? I'm not sure about a lethargic bird. It's over to you - any ideas? [Readers on Twitter have so far proposed Dodo and Pelican].

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Putilov, A., Donskaya, O., & Verevkin, E. (2015). How many diurnal types are there? A search for two further “bird species” Personality and Individual Differences, 72, 12-17 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2014.08.003

Depression can effect our 'gut instincts'

People who are depressed often complain that they find it difficult to make decisions. A new study provides an explanation. Carina Remmers and her colleagues tested 29 patients diagnosed with major depression and 27 healthy controls and they found that the people with depression had an impaired ability to go with their gut instincts, or what we might call intuition.

Intuition is not an easy skill to measure. The researchers' approach was to present participants with triads of words (e.g. SALT DEEP FOAM) and the task was to decide in less than three and a half seconds whether the three words were linked in meaning by a fourth word (in this case the answer was "yes" and the word was SEA). Some triads were linked, others weren't.

If the participants answered that the words were linked, they were given eight more seconds to provide the linking fourth word. However, it was perfectly acceptable for them to say that they felt the words were linked, but that they didn't know how. Indeed, when this occurred, it was taken by the researchers as an instance of intuition - that is, "knowing without knowing how one knows".

There were no differences between the depressed patients and controls in the number of times they provided the correct fourth, linking word, nor in the number times they provided no response at all. This suggests both groups were equally motivated and attentive to the task. But crucially, the depressed patients scored fewer correct intuitive answers (i.e. those times they stated correctly that the words were linked, but they didn't consciously know how).

Having poorer intuition on the task was associated with scoring higher on a measure of brooding (indicated by agreement with statements like "When I am sad, I think 'Why do I have problems others don't have?'"), and in turn this association appeared to be explained by the fact that the brooding patients felt more miserable.

Remmers and her team said their study makes an important contribution - in fact, it's the first time that intuition has been studied in people with major depression. The results are also consistent with past research involving healthy people that's shown low mood encourages an analytical style of thought and inhibits a creative, more intuitive thinking style.

However, I couldn't help doubting the realism of the measure of intuition used in this study. Is a judgement about word meanings really comparable to the gut decisions people have to make in their lives about jobs and relationships?

Two further questions that also remain outstanding are whether an impairment in intuitive thinking is a symptom or cause of depression; and is this intuition deficit specific to depression or will it be found in patients with other mental health problems?

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Remmers C, Topolinski S, Dietrich DE, & Michalak J (2014). Impaired intuition in patients with major depressive disorder. The British journal of clinical psychology / the British Psychological Society PMID: 25307321

Mate 'poaching'

According to one estimate, 63 per cent of men and 54 per cent of women are in their current long-term relationships because their current partner "poached" them from a previous partner. Now researchers in the US and Australia have conducted the first investigation into the fate of relationships formed this way, as compared with relationships formed by two unattached individuals.

An initial study involved surveying 138 heterosexual participants (average age 20; 71 per cent were women) four times over nine weeks. All were in current romantic relationships that had lasted so far from 0 to 36 months. Men and women who said they'd been poached by their current partner tended to start out the study by reporting less commitment to their existing relationship, feeling less satisfied in it, committing more acts of infidelity and looking out for more alternatives.What's more, over the course of the study, these participants reported progressively lower levels of commitment and satisfaction in their relationships. They also showed continued interest in other potential romantic partners and persistent levels of infidelity. This is in contrast to participants who hadn't been poached by their partners - they showed less interest in romantic alternatives over time.

The researchers led by Joshua Foster attempted to replicate these results with a second sample of 140 heterosexual participants who were surveyed six times over ten weeks. Again the participants who said they'd been poached by their partners tended to report less commitment and satisfaction in their current relationships, and more interest in romantic alternatives. However, unlike the first sample, this group did not show deterioration in their relationship over the course of the study. The researchers speculated this may be because the study was too short-lived or because deterioration in these relationships had already bottomed out.

It makes intuitive sense that people who were poached by their partners showed less commitment and satisfaction in their existing relationship. After all, if they were willing to abandon a partner in the past, why should they not be willing or even keen to do so again? This logic was borne out by a final study of 219 more heterosexual participants who answered questions not just about the way their current relationship had been formed, but also about their personalities and attitudes.

Foster and his team summarised the findings: "individuals who were successfully mate poached by their current partners tend[ed] to be socially passive, not particularly nice to others, careless and irresponsible, and narcissistic. They also tend[ed] to desire and engage in sexual behaviour outside of the confines of committed relationships." The last factor in particular (measured formally with the "Socio-sexual Orientation Inventory-revised") appeared to explain a large part of the link between having been poached by one's partner and having weak commitment to the new relationship.

Across the three studies, between 10 and 30 per cent of participants said they'd been poached by their current partners. This shows again that a significant proportion of relationships are formed this way, the researchers said, and that more research is needed to better understand how these relationships function. "We present the first known evidence [showing] specific long-term disadvantages for individuals involved in relations that formed via mate poaching," they concluded.

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Foster, J., Jonason, P., Shrira, I., Keith Campbell, W., Shiverdecker, L., & Varner, S. (2014). What do you get when you make somebody else’s partner your own? An analysis of relationships formed via mate poaching Journal of Research in Personality, 52, 78-90 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2014.07.008