Popular Facebook users 'feel more stress'
Facebook users with more friends suffer more stress and "neurotic limbo" from feeling they have to continually update and amuse their larger audiences, according to new research.
Doctors seeing unexplainable asthma attacks in patients should consider the stress brought on through social networking sites as a possible trigger Photo: ALAMY
But the claim has met skepticism from internet psychology experts, who question the methodology of the study.
A team at Edinburgh Napier University gathered online survey responses from 175 students about their feelings towards Facebook. Almost three quarters of respondents were women.
Dr Kathy Charles, who led the study, said: "We found it was actually those with the most contacts, those who had invested the most time in the site, who were the ones most likely to be stressed.
"It's like being a mini news channel about yourself. The more people you have the more you feel there is an audience there. You are almost a mini celebrity and the bigger the audience the more pressure you feel to produce something about yourself."
Some 12 per cent of respondents said Facebook makes them feel anxious. They had an average of 117 friends on the site, compared to an average of 75 friends for the rest of the students.
Acorss the whole sample, 63 per cent said they put off responding to new friend requests.
"Many also told us they were anxious about withdrawing from the site for fear of missing important social information or offending contacts," said Dr Charles.
Eleanor Barlow, an managing consultant specialising in cyberpsychology at IBM, said the claims were interesting, but should not be applied to the wider population on Facebook.
"Students often use Facebook in a quite different way to the rest of us," she explained.
"They are exploring their identity at that age, including online."
Despite the ubiquity of Facebook among students, the Edinburgh Napier study found they often feel it offers only modest or tenuous rewards.
"But many also told us they were anxious about withdrawing from the site for fear of missing important social information or offending contacts," said Dr Charles.
"Like gambling, Facebook keeps users in a neurotic limbo, not knowing whether they should hang on in there just in case they miss out on something good."
In November it was claimed by doctors writing in The Lancet that stress from a Facebook update triggered an athsma attack in a 17-year old girl.
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Popular Facebook users 'feel more stress' - Telegraph
via telegraph.co.uk
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