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How do hours of Facebook and constant streams of WhatsApp, tweets and text messages affect our cognition and mental health? Scientists are beginning to find out….

 

Green with FaceBook Envy

Spending a lot of time on Facebook is linked to diminished well-being, according to many studies. Yet questions linger about cause and effect—perhaps people who are already lonely simply spend more time on social media. New studies reveal that Facebook can indeed affect mood and mental state, and whether the effect is positive or negative depends heavily on how a person interacts with his or her contacts. Several of the new findings reveal that when Facebook hurts, the underlying culprit is—you guessed it— envy.

 

A study published in February 2015 in Computers in Human Behavior surveyed 736 college students and found that when Facebook evoked envy, it increased symptoms of depression. But a March 2015 study from the same journal found that Facebook use can actually decrease depression if users sign on seeking social connection and support and then feel they have received it.

Those studies did not attempt to figure out why some people experienced envy and others did not, but other studies have found that the way a user interacts with Facebook may be crucial. For example, researchers at the University of Michigan and KU Leuven in Belgium tracked 173 students’ habits over time and found that passive use—browsing news feeds, for example—led to reduced well-being by increasing feelings of envy. Active use, such as posting and commenting, had no such effect, according to the two studies, published in April 2015 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

 

Another important factor seems to be how close you are to the people with whom you interact. Two related experiments published in November 2015 in Computers in Human Behavior were the first to explore the role of relationship strength in users’ emotional responses to posts on the site. Among a sample of 207 American adults and 194 German college students, the researchers found that people more often felt positive emotions than negative ones when browsing the site, and their emotions were amplified when reading posts from someone they knew well.

 

Empathy is apparently more pronounced when the relationship is closer, so one is more likely to ‘catch’ the happiness of a close friend than a casual acquaintance. Close friends can inspire envy, too, but the researchers found that this type of envy tended to be benign—the overall reaction to a friend’s good news was usually positive.

 

The takeaway, the experts say, is that you can control how Facebook makes you feel. If you tend to compare yourself with others or get envious easily, you might consider limiting your time spent on social-networking sites or make a conscious effort to use them in active rather than passive ways. It is not technology such as Facebook that affects our feelings per se but rather how we use it.

 

Waiting for that Email

There’s nothing like firing off a carefully crafted e-mail and then waiting for what seems like an eternity for a reply. When you finally do get an answer, you might still be frustrated. What do you make of the fact that it is only 10 words long?

 

We now have some clues about typical email response patterns, thanks to a recent study drawing on 16 billion emails sent by more than two million people. The participants were Yahoo Mail users who allowed their anonymised data to be used in what appears to be the largest-ever analysis of email behaviour. The researchers, based at the University of Southern California and Yahoo Labs, used algorithms to mine data about the times messages were sent and the number of words they contained, among other factors. Here are some of the surprising revelations:

■ The most likely length of a reply is just five words.

■ More than 90 percent of replies are sent within a day.

■ The younger you are, the faster and shorter your reply.

■ Messages sent on weekday mornings got the fastest responses.

■ E-mails with attachments took twice as long to get a reply as those without.

 

The researchers included only users who wrote to one another at least five times in the months covered by the study period. After mining the data, the researchers found they could use their algorithm to predict when an email conversation was nearing its end. For the first half of a dialogue, correspondents usually developed similar reply times and email lengths, lobbing messages back and forth at a regular clip. Yet that similarity decreased as the conversation trailed off. Many conversations ended with a long lag before one correspondent sent a final brief reply.

Of note to the anxious emailer: the more words in a reply, the longer it tended to take for the writer to send it—but only up to 100 words. Beyond that, the time for a reply actually dropped slightly, except for in the oldest age group. So if you’re expecting a hefty reply to your mission-critical missive, it won’t necessarily take any longer than a 100-word message. That may be some comfort while you wait on the edge of your seat.

 

How the younger sexes text

Texting has become the most popular form of communication among people under 30. One recent study found that students spend less than six minutes, on average, on schoolwork before being distracted by social media and texting. For a small percentage of teens, texting becomes compulsive—they may try to text less and fail or feel anxiety and frustration if they are kept away from texting. A new study from the American Psychological Association eval- uated how 211 girls and 192 boys communicated via text and found notable gender differences in overall behaviour and compulsive use:

 

■ Teenage girls use texting for social connection, whereas boys mostly use it to convey information.

■ Boys and girls send about the same number of texts every day, but girls are more likely to become compulsive texters.

■ Teenage girls who compulsively text see a steeper decline in their grades than their compulsive male counterparts. The researchers suggest the social content of girls’ messages may be more likely to distract them from their academic tasks.

■ Compulsive texting also appears to affect girls’ mental health more than boys’, perhaps because girls are more prone to text about negative feelings and to ruminate on those feelings.