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Whether you welcome our new way of socializing with
open arms or find yourself cursing under your breath every time you have to
un-tag yourself in an unattractive whisky-induced photo from a recent trip,
it’s indisputable that Facebook is our overlord. With its hefty IPO boost of
25%, along with GM dropping its $10 million advertising campaign, believing it
created little to no impact on its target consumers, it is incredible how much
money is being thrown around in this virtual hangout. Thenextweb.com estimates the average Facebook user to be worth
approximately $121 to the conglomerates who are itching to have their
advertising pop up on your newsfeed.
Yes, your inebriated musings, the photo gallery of 102
photos of your dog swimming in a pool, the heartfelt open letter to friends you
wrote after you broke up with your college sweetheart are all apparently worth
$121. With users spending a collective 700 billion minutes a month
on Facebook, it’s no surprise that this interaction is being closely
scrutinized and studied by researchers who aim to expose how this site is
altering our social lives, personalities and reactions to social norms. Not
only are researchers finding unanticipated effects of long-term use of the
site, studies have also exposed interesting patterns occurring in profiles.
So how exactly has Facebook changed us?
More Online Friends, More Brain Cells
While you may think that having a high friend count on
Facebook would be a red flag for desolate individuals who feel inadequate with
their number of real-life acquaintances, a study conducted at University
College London found that users with the highest number of online contacts have
more gray matter in brain regions associated with social skills. Lead professor
Geraint Rees agrees that in our modern world, “social networks are ubiquitous
in human society,” and with that acceptance comes an interesting query. “In
contemporary societies with online social networks, do people use them (social
skills) in the same way or are they enabling a completely different type of
communication and interaction that was never before possible?” To further
research this question, his team carried out MRI scans on 165 male and female
subjects who answered questions about how many friends they had on Facebook and
in real life. The study found that subjects with a higher online friend count
also had greater gray matter density in three separate brain regions: the superior
temporal sulcus and the middle temporal gyrus, two brain regions which have in
the past been linked to the ability to perceive social cues from facial
expressions, and the entorhinal cortex, a region linked to memory of face
recognition and names.
While his findings are interesting, at this point it
is impossible to tell if the gray matter is actually related to a different
kind of social skill. "The interesting question left unanswered is
whether this is set in stone and those bits of your brain are hard-wired and
determined by your genes, or whether if you bring people up in the right kind
of social environment, those bits of the brain grow and therefore the number of
people they can maintain as friends in adulthood increases." This study is
one of many that intend to open the floodgates for future research into how
exactly this new way of interaction is changing our minds, and hope to
introduce enough interesting findings for further research to elaborate on.
Women Who Base Their Self-Worth on Appearance Have
More Friends and Photo Galleries
We all know at least a few women who are serial
Facebook frienders. This woman is probably also the one who wakes up the
morning after a party to plug in her camera and upload any photos she hadn’t
posted the previous night and has them tagged and liked, all before you even
dream of dragging yourself out of bed to shower. According to a new study
published in the journalCyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking,
researcher Michael A. Stefanone found that there is indeed a reason why some
women act this way on Facebook: it’s because they base their self-worth on
their appearance. In a study conducted to measure 311 participants’ (both male
and female) online behaviors and self-esteem, researchers found that “those
whose self-esteem is based on public-based contingencies (defined here as
others' approval, physical appearance and outdoing others in competition) were
more involved in online photo sharing, and those whose self-worth is most
contingent on appearance have a higher intensity of online photo sharing.”
While it may sound very dated to say that women base their self-esteem on how
others perceive them, head researcher Stefanone was also discouraged. "It
is disappointing to me that in the year 2011 so many young women continue to
assert their self-worth via their physical appearance — in this case, by
posting photos of themselves on Facebook as a form of advertisement. Perhaps
this reflects the distorted value pegged to women's looks throughout the
popular culture and in reality programming from 'The Bachelor' to 'Keeping Up
with the Kardashians.'"
Your Facebook Photo Predicts Your Happiness
It may make you feel self-demeaning to go back and
check this theory for yourself, but a recent study published in the journal Social
Psychological and Personality Science shows that the smile intensity from
a single profile picture today can predict how satisfied that person will be
with their life four years into the future. Through two studies, psychologists
found that men and women who smiled with the most intensity in their profile
photos during their first semester at college later testified to being more
satisfied with their lives than those who did not smile. The same students with
the most intense smiles reported high levels of satisfaction during their last
semester of college a whole 3.5 years later. The cowriters believe these
findings are for the most part remarkable since the findings are based on
informal photos, as opposed to earlier research conducted with formal portraits
from, say, college yearbooks. The psychologists believe that this
research is “a sizable — and long overdue — step forward in the quest to
understand whether and why affective displays in publicly shared photographs
can predict future well-being.” While the correlation between one’s smile and
the outcome of one’s life is still unclear, researchers believe that it’s
likely that the natural smile on Facebook signals a person’s personality traits
in real life.
