New research recently published suggests that teens who are lonely communicate more online than teens who aren’t so lonely.
Perhaps this should be filed in the “No duh” section of research findings about online behavior, but it actually answers a long-standing question — Does the Internet make people more lonely, or do lonely people turn to the Internet for solace?
The answer, from this study anyway, appears to be the latter — lonely people communicate online significantly more than non-lonely people do.
The Australian researchers (Bonetti et al., 2010) arrived at this finding by gathering survey data from 626 children and teens (10 to 16 years old). The surveys assessed subjects’ frequency of communication online, as well as loneliness (via an abbreviated UCLA loneliness scale) and social anxiety (via an abbreviated Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents).
What did the researchers find?
A new study out suggests that when we are looking through our friends’ updates, photos, etc. on Facebook, we show greater physiological evidence of pleasantness (as measured through facial muscle EMG responses). Why would we express more pleasantness when looking at specific information regarding one of our “friends” on Facebook?