Do you have such an experience, in social communication software and platforms such as WeChat, the frequency of "sunbathing" of people around us is different: some people can be called "screen kings", shopping on the street, traveling and hiking, and even the every move of pets at home must be revealed to the world, and it is the nine-square grid diagram at every turn. But the other person is the "Dive King", the latest circle of friends can't wait to trace back to the vision of adding chicken soup on the Spring Festival this year, and then the previous one... is the vision of the Spring Festival the year before last and chicken soup.
Social media obsession has been considered highly harmful by social psychology researchers Phone screenshot
The act of showing oneself too much on social media and being keen to build a "perfect persona" can certainly be seen as an identity anxiety and narcissistic tendency in the mobile web age. But isn't there any benefit to posting Moments frequently? - Of course there is! Although many social psychologists have long formed a stereotype: successful and rich real social interaction can effectively improve our health and reduce the risk of disease, while virtual social interaction is a kind of "drawing bread and hunger" behavior, excessive addiction will only amplify our loneliness, not good for physical and mental health. However, with the deepening of research, this black-and-white thesis is gradually being overturned, and some online virtual social behaviors are likely to be as beneficial as real social interaction; But at the same time, some entirely new hazards are emerging.
Send a picture, add a stranger,
Wellness is simple!
As early as October 2016, William A. William R Hobbs and his research team published a research paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), "Online Social Integration Is Associated with a Reduced Risk of Death." He came to a surprising conclusion: after controlling for other influencing factors, the activity of the circle of friends was negatively correlated with mortality. That is, the more active a person is on social networks, the lower the risk of death.
Hobbes and his team analyzed the profiles of 12,689,047 users of the famous foreign social app Facebook and their online dating within 6 months, and recorded their health status during a two-year follow-up. As a control group, Hobbes carefully studied the health records of all registered California voters, and after correcting for gender, age and race data, he found that people who refused to socialize online had a 12 percent higher risk of death than Facebook users.
In light of this, Hobbes made his assertion in his paper that more social support and social network integration could lead to better physical health outcomes for humans. For example, social integration is a healthy behavior that can boost immunity and reduce the incidence of certain diseases. But while all of these activities used to take place in face-to-face social interactions in the real world, can online social interactions do the same? The answer is not a simple "yes".
Hobbes found that the increased social interaction and the reduced risk of death are not simply linear: liking frequent attacks and making friends requests to strangers does not reduce the risk of death, and even the health risks added by actively dating too often are as high as the level of refusal to communicate on social networks.
Conversely, a preference for requests from strangers to make friends showed a strong correlation with a lower risk of death. In the control group, the people who most often accepted requests from strangers had an average 66% lower risk of death than those who did not accept strangers' offers at all.
Hobbs et al., 2016
Hobbes's research involved four common ways to interact: update status, send photos, text, and tags (similar to friend impressions in QQ).
The more the color tends to be red, the higher the risk of death; Conversely, the more blue it tends to be, the lower the risk of death Original literature (Hobbs et al., 2016)
The results of the study found that the more frequently the posting status, the higher the risk of death; The more frequently photos are posted, the lower the risk of death. Those who updated a lot of photos but didn't post much of their status had an average risk of dying at 70 percent of the average. The frequency of text posting and labelling was not associated with the risk of death.
Why? Hobbes speculates that this may be due to the fact that social network users who like to post photos and videos are also active social participants in reality, after all, you can only take pictures of visual material that can be put on social media after traveling, spending and partying, even if only to show off.
For teenagers, the number of visual messages posted on social networks is closely related to their popularity in social networks http://www.smarttechbuzz.org
Of course, actively posting visual information on social media can certainly lead to more social interaction and opportunities to expand new social relationships. Experts from the School of Communication at the State University of New York at Buffalo once surveyed more than 2,000 teenage Facebook users between the ages of 12 and 28 and found that the first factor they chose to invite through stranger friends was the attractiveness of the other person's avatar, and the second was the frequency of the other person's photo update. Whether it was their own friends or strangers who had recently asked for mutual contact, the comprehensive rating score of users who took more than 2.16 photos of the daily change was significantly higher than that of the control group with more than this number of daily changes. Users who update photos more frequently tend to be associated with positive evaluation labels such as "funny", "outgoing", "friendly" and "good relationship with the opposite sex".
Many psychologists have analyzed that Trump, who frequently tweets but does not post images, is very worried about his psychological condition https://www.mercurynews.com
Conversely, if a user frequently updates the text information of their social account without posting any visual images, it is likely that the cause is a setback in real life, which may have adverse physical and mental health consequences if not handled properly.
Don't socialize, be careful of these diseases!
The dissatisfied Hobbes also tried to further screen the data to identify diseases that people who lacked online and offline social interaction were more likely to suffer, and the results were shocking: they were more likely to die from suicide (depression), substance abuse and cardiovascular disease. Of course, this phenomenon may be partly explained by differences in socioeconomic status, because there are differences in social status and economic status between social groups who can use social media and those who do not. For example, the "invisible poor" at the bottom of society is a group that has the smallest amount of information released in both reality and the Internet, and lacks any form of social interaction. But Hobbes found that even among social income groups, differences in the risk of death due to social differences persisted.
Hobbs et al., 2016
Not only that, maintaining positive social interaction, even online social interaction, has a positive significance for improving health for both young people and the elderly.
Maintaining adequate online and physical social activities in older adults significantly reduces the risk of Alzheimer's disease |
In 2007, the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh published a longitudinal study spanning more than 70 years, collecting intelligence test results from 550 volunteers in 1932 (age 11) and 2001 (age 80) in an attempt to identify factors that influence cognitive levels in later life. It was found that after excluding variables such as gender, educational attainment, and social rank, loneliness was the only factor that predicted participants' IQ at age 80, and that higher loneliness was associated with lower intellectual performance. Brain imaging results showed that lonely elderly people had higher levels of amyloid precipitation in their brains, and excessive amyloid precipitation was a core physiological indicator of Alzheimer's disease.
Donovan N J, Okereke O I, Vannini P, et al. Association of higher cortical amyloid burden with loneliness in cognitively normal older adults
Conversely, older people with larger and richer social circles are less likely to get Alzheimer's disease and better at cognitive performance. This suggests that loneliness may affect our brain's ability to remove garbage and burdens.
Not just older adults, loneliness-induced depression is equally pronounced in adolescents and adult women. Studies have shown that adult women who lack interpersonal communication have depressive symptoms that are 73% higher than women with normal social status.
Wary! Contagious loneliness
So, actively participate in online social networking, accept new friends, and frequently post pictures to interact with each other? Of course not.
John Cacioppo, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, and his colleagues have demonstrated the contagious nature of loneliness in social networks. They first found that lonely people like to spend time with equally lonely people, they always like to stay in groups on the fringes of social networks, and they don't like to communicate or approach users who are open to extroverts and act as "networking nodes" on social networks.
What's more, the researchers were surprised to find that over time, loneliness can gradually spread in social networks like an infectious disease, and can be transmitted as far as the third level, that is, to the friends of friends of friends; And people who are originally lonely will become more and more lonely over time.
Loneliness spreads in a social network of 1019 people, yellow dots represent loneliness 0-1 days to be infected, green dots represent 2 days to be infected, and blue dots represent 3 days and more; The red line represents siblings, and the black line represents friends and spouses Holt-Lunstad J, Smith T B, Baker M, et al. Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality
Loneliness can be contagious, and this result upends our previous perceptions and life experiences. One explanation is that people who may feel lonely actively cut back on social needs, so that those with whom they are most socially close also passively reduce social interactions, thereby enhancing the experience of loneliness, but whether this hypothesis is true needs further research.
Therefore, if you are a lonely person and want to try to break the shackles of loneliness, then what you need first is not simply to increase the frequency of interaction, but the courage to step out of the social comfort zone and try to "break the ice" - to make friends with those who are different from their own style in social interaction and are more extroverted, thereby cutting off this spreading chain of loneliness contagion.
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Author: Deng Xiaofei
Editor: Zhu Buchong
An AI
Hurriedly sent a few friend circle nine grids, hoping to continue life