Facebook’s emotional consequences: Why Facebook causes a decrease in mood and why people still use it

“Instead, when asked about reasons for certain action, many individuals tend to generate reasons that they consider plausible and that are easily accessible in memory, but that are not necessarily related to the actual cause of the behavior (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).”

“They tie in with previous findings pointing to the negative emotional states Facebook can put its users in (Burke et al., 2010; Krasnova et al., 2013).”

“Wise et al. (2010) conducted simultaneous physiological measures of pleasantness during Facebook use, but distinguished only between directed (e.g., a certain friend’s profile) and arbitrary (e.g., news feed) information seeking without relating those activities to others such as communication or…”

“Other mechanisms that have been proposed include the perception of having wasted time (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014), brooding or worrying (Shaw et al., 2015), and information overload (Koroleva, Krasnova, & Günther, 2010).”

“Multiple studies have linked social media use with declines in subjective mood, sense of well-being, and life satisfaction.[17, 21, 34] For example, passive consumption of social media content—as opposed to active communication—has been associated with decrease in bonding and bridging social capital and increase in lo…”

“One advantage of experimental exposure lies in the immediate experience of Facebook use and its affective consequences, thereby avoiding problems associated with retrospective self-reports [3].”

“First, partially consistent with the hypotheses and past research, 7,14,35 more frequent Instagram use had a marginally significant direct association with greater depressive symptoms.”

“If experiment effects did affect the findings of the present study, they might even turn in the opposite direction because people, in general, perceive Facebook as a source to positive feelings.(8) In addition, one may ask why so many people are using Facebook in the first place if the social network was hypothesized…”

“…as a budding resource of positive effects on the psyche (e.g., boosting self-worth, selfintegrity, & self-esteem; Gentile et al., 2012; Toma & Hancock, 2013); the other offers a darker, more negative outlook (e.g., social media negatively affecting emotional states; Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014).”

“Previous research has revealed that the more time individuals spent browsing Facebook, the more negative their mood was immediately afterwards, and this was mediated by a feeling of not having done anything meaningful (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014).”

“This effect could be amplified by users’ negative thoughts and feelings about having wasted time online (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014).”

“They also reported results from a short-term experimental study that found that giving up Facebook for a week increased positive emotions (Tromholt, 2016; see also Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014).”

“, “… hinders my personal growth.”) were developed based on prior research (e.g., Beutel et al., 2011; Kross et al., 2013; Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014) that assessed negative consequences of Internet use on different well-being dimensions (e.g., global, affective, or social well-being, Huta &…”

“Similarly, Sagioglou and Greitemeyer (2014) noted that Facebook use negatively affects people’s mood because they feel like they wasted time and engaged in something meaningless by being active on Facebook.”

“Studies have tested the emotional consequences of viewing others ’ posts in general (e.g., Fardouly, Diedrichs, Vartanian, & Halliwell, 2015; Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014; Vogel, Rose, Okdie, Eckles, & Franz, 2015) or manipulated other factors such as (un)attractiveness or (un)successfulness of…”

“…of SC, most studies have shown empirical evidence of the negative effects of SC (Krasnova, Wenninger, Widjaja, & Buxmann, 2013; Kross et al., 2013; Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014; Steers, Wickham, & Acitelli, 2014; Tandoc, Ferrucci, & Duffy, 2015), or mixed (e.g., Batenburg & Das, 2015; Johnson &…”

“However, recent research has shown that users become depressed [50], and their productivity at work is affected due to increases in the time spent using SNSs.”

“The same question was asked about Facebook use in [71], in which answers were found to be highly similar to answers in response to alternate wordings “.”

“In previous studies, passive use has been measured in various ways: (a) through experimental manipulation of Facebook activity (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014; Verduyn et al., 2015), (b) through access to server logs from Facebook (Burke et al., 2010), or (c) by using subscales which measure feature…”

“People expect SNS use to alleviate negative emotion and reduce the occurrence of negative life events; however, this expectation proves pointless and emotions do not improve, leading to depression (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014).”

“…of resources may explain why SM use has been associated with organizational deviance (Carlson et al., 2016), loneliness (Kross et al., 2013), negative mood (Safioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014), depression (Cambron, Acitelli, & Steinberg, 2010), and decreased life satisfaction (Kuss & Griffiths, 2012).”

“Some have focused on the effect of Facebook on the mind or behavior of users (Lönnqvist and große Deters 2016; Sagioglou and Greitemeyer 2014; Shen et al. 2015), some have probed into the interactions between Facebook users (Brailovskaia and Bierhoff 2016; Mendes et al. 2015), and some have…”

“Similarly, Sagioglou and Greitemeyer (2014) found that the longer participants used Facebook in a single session, the more negative was their mood afterwards.”

“Several studies showed that SNSs use is negatively associated with well-being [9,10], while others revealed a positive relationship [11,12].”

“…positive associations between SNS use and subjective well-being (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007; Grieve, Indian, Witteveen, Anne Tolan, & Marrington, 2013; Oh, Ozkaya, & LaRose, 2014), while others report the opposite (Fox & Moreland, 2015; Kross et al., 2013; Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014).”

“Sagioglou and Greitemeyer (2014) investigated the relationships FA and affective components of subjective well-being.”

“Sagioglou and Greitemeyer (2014) report a mean of 352; the reported numbers of Facebook friends for our sample are in line with these values (see Table 3).”

“Indeed, experiencing addiction-related symptoms in the context of technology use can be stressful (Samaha and Hawi, 2016), and so is the mere use of an SNS (Afifi et al., 2018).”

“…and active use has measured social media engagement in one of three ways: experimental manipulation within a laboratory setting (Orben et al., 2018; Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014; Verduyn et al., 2015), the tracking of participants’ behavior online through social media logs that require special…”

“…prior studies have used either a cross-sectional design or measured the instant mood after viewing SNS content in an experimental situation; these study designs make it difficult to determine whether SNS usage has long-term effects on users’ psychological well-being (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014).”

“…majority of extant research seems to conclude that smartphone use is associated with lower well-being (cf., Hall & Baym, 2011; Jim & Park, 2012; Kross et al., 2013; McDaniel, 2015; Pantic, 2014; Primack et al., 2017; Quan-Haase & Collins, 2008; Roberts & David, 2016; Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014).”

“This is because research has shown that individuals believe spending time on Facebook improves their mood (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014).”

“…solitude and displace potentially more interactive social activities, people who spend large amounts of time on the internet may end up feeling socially isolated, cause a decline in mood (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014) and low life satisfaction (Kim, LaRose, & Peng, 2009; Stepanikova et al., 2010).”

“In another surprising revelation, Sagioglou and Greitemeyer [122] noted that the longer one spent time on Facebook, the worse off one ’ s mood became.”

“38 Indeed, frequent social media users display strong hedonic reactions upon exposure to social media-related stimuli (e.g., seeing the Facebook logo).”

“This distinction is important given prior findings that passive consumption of social media is associated with lower subjective well-being and greater envy, both across persons and within persons (Krasnova, Wenninger, Widjaja, & Buxmann, 2013; Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014; Verduyn et al., 2015).”

“Finally, Sagioglou and Greitemeyer (2014) found evidence for the negative influence of Facebook on mood: users felt that their Facebook activity lacked “meaning” and overestimated how happy Facebook would make them feel, thereby falling victim to an “affective forecasting error.””

“Alternatively, existing research has found a relationship between body dissatisfaction and negative affect and specific sites, like Facebook.21,22 It could be possible that the more sites an individual visits, the more likely they are to encounter these particular sites which potentially induce body dissatisfaction an…”

“Users in both cultures reported experiencing negative affects due to social overload, waste of time, and regret (e.g., Peters et al., 2015; Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014).”

“11 Sagioglou and Greitemeyer 12 explained that the lowered mood following individuals’ Facebook usage is mediated by the feeling of wasting time and the perception of Facebook activity as being less meaningful.”

“Whether social media use improves well-being is a complex question depending on the nature of the engagement [55, 62, 65, 68, 88, 95, 100], but thanks to instant gratification and sites’ use of gamification [19, 49, 104] and behavior design techniques [35, 40] to drive engagement, users keep coming back to the point t…”

“…regarding the “Facebook Depression” hypothesis has been mixed with studies that showed a negative association (Kross et al., 2013; Labrague, 2014; Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014), no association (Datu, Valdez, & Datu, 2012; Jelenchick et al., 2013) or even a positive association (Gerson,…”

“On the other hand, it has been linked to a range of negative consequences, for example to poorer sleep (Levenson et al., 2016, 2017), lower affective wellbeing (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014; Weinstein, 2018), and poorer mental health (Keles et al., 2019).”

“During the rapid rise of social networking sites (SNS) and the number of people using them in a little more than a decade, an increase of mental health issues among their audiences has been recorded and published [23, 27, 29, 33], while further studies looked at their impacts on social capital and connectedness [1, 2,…”

“Moreover, researchers (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014; Turel & Qahri-Saremi, 2016) provide evidence that social media users even feel guilty about neglecting their life values in favor of new technologies but cannot always manage their behavior.”

“Facebook use and its potential negative consequences (Frost and Rickwood, 2017; Kross et al., 2013; Marino et al., 2018; Sagioglou and Greitemeyer, 2014), specifically the development of addictive tendencies (Andreassen et al., 2012), need to be addressed in the psychoeducation.”

“Yet, optimal level and type of customizability is unclear, especially given the potential gap between what individuals prefer and what will actually help them [50,102].”

“However, it is also possible that the potential adverse consequences of excessive social media use, such as perceived misuse of time, envy, reduced self-esteem, depressed mood, and escaping daily life [26, 27], may add to the complexities of motherhood in negative ways.”

“It is also possible that the feeling of “time wasted” by engaging in activities of little meaning on SM negatively influencesmood.(88)Moreover, in a nationally representative survey that assessed general health among college-age students, Internet use and computer games have consistently been identified among the top…”

“The use of Facebook, in particular, has been linked to low mood and depression in many populations [27,28,91].”

“…on individuals’ social capital, some researchers have suggested that social networking activities, such as Facebook, can have a negative impact on people’s happiness (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014) and emotions, inciting jealousy, social tension, and social overload (Krasnova et al., 2013).”

“Using Facebook, especially for extended periods of time, can worsen individuals’ moods (Sagioglou & Geitemeyer, 2014).”

“Much research has considered motivations for Facebook use (e.g., Aladwani, 2014), and has explored the negative outcomes associated with Facebook use (e.g., Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014).”

“Perlis, MD MSc (1,2)*, Jon Green, PhD (3), Matthew Simonson, PhD (3,4), Katherine Ognyanova, PhD (5), Mauricio Santillana, PhD (2,6), Jennifer Lin (7), Alexi Quintana (3), Hanyu Chwe (3), James Druckman, PhD (7), David Lazer, PhD (3), Matthew A.”

“It can be asserted that SNSs can no longer be used for escape from the real world even it may become a necessity to catch what’s going on and to increase positive feelings even if it not so (Sagioglou and Greitemeyer 2014).”

“Sagioglou and Greitemeyer (2014) found in their study that social media use is associated with negative moods.”

“Sagioglou and Greitemeyer (22) states that the longer individuals use Facebook, the stronger are their negative emotions.”

“Despite the evidence that social networks such as Facebook can be stressful [48,49,96-98], there exists some empirical evidence to suggest that being connected to social media can mitigate the physiological response to a psychosocially stressful condition [38] or that adding social media interventions improves the out…”

“Although social comparison behaviors are pervasive on Facebook, only a few studies have investigated this phenomenon (Chou & Edge, 2012; Feinstein et al., 2013; Haferkamp & Krämer, 2011; Kross et al., 2013; Lin & Utz, 2015; Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014).”