How Using Facebook can Lead to a Roller Coaster of Emotions

Does Facebook makes you feel that everyone's having fun except you? You may be just overestimating your friends' happiness, suggests a new study.

A Stanford University research has suggested that when we misgauge our friends' negative feelings, we feel worse about ourselves.

Facebook Users Prone to Eating Disorders
Adolescent girls who spent more time in front of Facebook are more likely to have some kind of eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia and exaggerated dieting, says study.

For the study, the researchers examined how college students evaluate their own mood and that of their peers. They foound students greatly underestimated other people's negative emotions, which in turn increased their own feelings of unhappiness because they felt "less normal."

"People think, 'Why am I alone on a Saturday night or why I am not in a relationship?'" he said. "When people overestimate the happiness of friends, they felt more negatively about their own lives," ABC News quoted lead researcher Alex Jordan, a social psychologist, as saying.

The researchers also found that the majority of students were unable to accurately gauge others' happiness even when they were evaluating the moods of people they knew well. Not surprisingly, the more students underestimated others' negative emotions, the more they tended to report feeling lonely.

Facebook Couples to Get Intimate Faster
New couples who are avid users of Facebook, and other social networking tools find it easy to get intimate, a new US survey has revealed.

Junior Kayla Dellefratte from Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. logs off Facebook when she begins to feel frustrated with what she is seeing.

"I see one of my friends living life, their own life, and I feel like stalking their photos is like I'm not living. It's not a great feeling," she said.

Facebook, Twitter - Making Us Less Human
Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are threatening to dominate our lives, making us more isolated and less human, says a leading academic in the U.S.

Catalina Toma, a communications professor at the University of Wisconsin believes passive Facebook consumption (such as monitoring your friends' newsfeeds) can leave people feeling lonelier than before they logged on.

"People naturally compare themselves to those around them, a process known as social comparison. If you perceive yourself to be doing better than your friends in an area that is important for you the social comparison will make you feel good. However, if you think your friends surpass you in an area that's important to your self-concept, you will likely feel dejected as a result of the comparison," she wrote in an e-mail.

Facebook To Help Locate Missing Children With Proposed 'Amber Alerts'
Facebook is teaming up with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to launch a new system called Amber alerts to issue bulletins about child abductions.

The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Source-ANI