Washington (ANI): People who consider using Facebook as an antidepressant, think again as a recent study has proved that using Facebook makes you feel more ‘pitied’ about yourself.
Christina Sagioglou and Tobias Greitemeyer of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, who co-authored the new study, revealed that compared to browsing the Internet, Facebook is judged as less meaningful, less useful, and more of a waste of time, which ultimately leads to a decrease in mood, the Huffington post reported.
The researchers had conducted two experiments. While in the first test, they asked participants to indicate the time they’d spent on Facebook that day and rate their mood, in the second experiment, which had different participants, they asked one group of people to spend 20 minutes on Facebook by posting status updates, conversing with pals and scanning their News Feeds, and another group to spend the same amount of time just browsing through the internet without opening any social media sites. Meanwhile, a third control group was left to do as they pleased with no instructions at all.
The Austrian researchers found people feel crummy any time they’re on Facebook for too long, no matter what pops up, and Sagioglou said that it wasn’t surprising that people felt bad after doing something they didn’t consider very meaningful, as it actually accounted for the mood effects, but people continued to do such tasks due to “affective forecasting error.”
The research is published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
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