Social Media Archives

Social media has facilitated both new ways of connecting with others and new ways of tallying how our lives stack up against theirs. In the twenty-first century, keeping up with the Joneses has become keeping up with the hundreds of people on your Facebook feed. Several previous studies have suggested that comparing yourself with others…

From getting married to buying homes, millennials are accused of doing everything later. But that’s not true when it comes to having life crises. As the rise of the term “quarter-life” crisis suggests, having life crises is something millennials seem willing to do early and often. So what do you do when you want to…

I’m not going to bother telling you not to use your phone before bed. Partly because you’ve probably heard that advice before, and partly because it would be hypocritical of me to do so! But I am going to highlight the results of a study that shows what might happen to people who do and…

In my last post, I talked about how children in neighborhoods with faster internet apparently evaluate their lives more negatively. That study is one of several that has explored a possible link between internet use and mental health risk. One thing to keep in mind when we talk about “internet use,” however, is that there…

Maybe you’ve heard that social media usage is linked to lower life satisfaction. But what does that mean? There are multiple ways social media and life satisfaction could be “linked”: People with higher life satisfaction use social media less than people with lower life satisfaction People tend to use social media more when they become…

Go on a Facebook binge, and the consequence might be … I’m sorry, where was I? A new study by researchers at the University of Michigan implicates social media usage in higher rates of everyday memory failures such as forgetting whether you’ve already done something, or what it is you were going to do for…

We tend to curate our Facebook profiles to control the image we project. But a new study suggests that when it comes to mental health, our Facebook posts might be more revealing than we realize. In the study, researchers in Philadelphia, PA and Stony Brook, NY looked to see if they could identify people with…

Here’s a shocking finding: going on the Internet might correlate with good mental health. And if you don’t find that shocking, you probably don’t spend enough time on the Internet. That finding is from a recent study that tracked the media habits of 633 German students with the goal of untangling how different types of…

What happens on Facebook stays on Facebook? Maybe not. Considering how much time we spend on social media, it makes sense that our online interactions could affect our behavior IRL. And researchers are increasingly finding that this is the case, for better and for worse. Let’s start with the “better.” A little online peer pressure…

Social media makes a lot of things easier. Keeping up with old friends. Sharing your vacation pictures. Comparing yourself to other people. It’s that last one that could be causing problems, according to two new studies published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. Social networking isn’t inherently bad for people’s mental health, the…