Your Facebook Friends Can Make You Happier, Study Finds

Ignore the critics: If you love spending time on Facebook and feel it improves your life, you may well be right. In fact, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have found that significant interactions with Facebook friends can bolster users' reported well-being, with effects comparable in size to those of major life events.

Skeptical? Well, simply receiving "likes," or reading friends' posts about their lives or political opinions, provides little comfort. People may appreciate these features of Facebook, but they don't appear to contribute significantly to users' overall sense of well-being.

Moira Burke, a research scientist, and Robert Kraut, a professor, conducted the study out of the university's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. They found that genuine, personalized interactions from real friends, such as a comment on a another's post or posting on someone else's wall, are a significant form of social engagement.

"People derive benefits from online communication, as long it comes from others they care about and has been tailored for them," the authors write.

"We're not talking about anything that's particularly labor-intensive," said Burke in a press release published this week. "This can be a comment that's just a sentence or two. The important thing is that someone such as a close friend takes the time to personalize it. The content may be uplifting, and the mere act of communication reminds recipients of the meaningful relationships in their lives."

The researchers quote one respondent telling them about a particularly meaningful interaction with a friend who said, "I post funny cat videos to her wall and she writes on my wall counting down the days until we’re in the same town and get to see each other.”

While some might see such interactions as mere trivia, much in-person social interaction is also apparently frivolous. It's the accumulated meaning of all these little gestures and messages that make up the substance of real relationships.

Critics of social media — often explicitly or implicitly denigrating so-called "millennials" — have often pointed to Facebook as an example of faux social interaction, a poor facsimile for the real benefits of communicating face-to-face.

Researchers have provided some support for these criticisms. Previous studies have found that most people's Facebook friends are not really "friends" in the meaningful sense. Posting about your workouts on Facebook is indicative of narcissism. The website is a hotbed of cyberbullying.

Previous research even suggested that going on Facebook was associated with users feeling less happy on average.

"You're left to wonder — is it that unhappy people are using social media, or is social media affecting happiness?" Kraut said.

He and Burke argue that people who are feeling less happy might use Facebook more because they're trying to get the emotional boost that comes from positive social interaction. Just as you might have some friends who you call when you're feeling down, users might turn to social media when they need a lift.

"This suggests that people who are feeling down may indeed spend more time on social media, but they choose to do so because they've learned it makes them feel better," said Burke. "They're reminded of the people they care about in their lives."

Several previous studies pointed the finger at certain Facebook practices, such as scrolling through the News Feed and reading about other people's social lives, as negative influences. But Kraut and Burke's most recent analysis did not find any Facebook habits to be associated with decreased well-being.

One potential reason for this difference is the length of time this study spanned. Most previous studies were conducted over a short period of time.

Kraut and Burke monitored a group of more than 1,900 Facebook users' activity on the site over three months, along with their reported well-being at the end of each month.

Having an objective measure of Facebook activity, rather than relying on subjective reports of personal habits, strengthens the researchers' findings. And since the study asked participants to rate their well-being retrospectively for the month, it's possible any short-term decreases in well-being caused by "Fear Of Missing Out" or anger at your ex's happy life weren't measured.

Further, the fact that the study was limited to people who were willing to consent to have their Facebook activity tracked (even though the monitoring preserved anonymity), might limit the extent to which the findings generalize to the rest of the population.

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and Google.

Photo credit: Pixabay