Do you ever go to parties just to look at beautiful people and listen to them chatter about their lovely lives? Lives punctuated only occasionally by some glitch—maybe a death in the family, or a social injustice that warrants reprimanding of societal power structures—but even in those moments the people are brimming with compassion, empathy, and insight? And you just show up and stare and listen and stare.
Such is the Facebook experience for many people, according to psychologists at the University of Houston and Palo Alto University. While using Facebook has been shown to provide needed self-affirmation and to further improve the quality of already-good romantic relationships, these researchers published two studies that—along with another one from applied social psychologists at University of Cologne in the same journal this week—seem to confirm an association between Facebook use and depressive symptoms. (Not depression in the debilitating clinical sense, but milder manifestations.)
