Is Facebook Making You Feel Bad About Yourself?

According to new research, it turns out that pouring over friends' vacation photos, gushing status updates, and career successes is making people miserable.

In a study conducted by Humboldt University in Berlin and Technical University in Darmstadt, German researchers asked 600 Facebook users how they felt while navigating the social networking platform. More than a third of the respondents reported feeling negative, but it had nothing to do with Facebook's ever-changing privacy policies and advertisements—most of those bad vibes were rooted in jealousy. 

 "We were surprised by how many people have a negative experience from Facebook, with envy leaving them feeling lonely, frustrated or angry," Hanna Krasnova of the Institute of Information Systems at Humboldt University told Reuters. (She was the project manager for the report, "Envy on Facebook: A Hidden Threat to Users' Life Satisfaction?" which was released on Tuesday and will be presented at a conference in Germany in February.) 

Passive Facebook users—people who read their news feeds, peeked at photos, and browsed their friends pages but didn't share much themselves—were the ones most likely to feel bad, the researchers discovered.

"Access to copious positive news and the profiles of seemingly successful 'friends' fosters social comparison that can readily provoke envy," Krasnova explained in her report. "By and large, online social networks allow users unprecedented access to information on relevant others—insights that would be much more difficult to obtain offline." 

Lylah M. Alphonse 

 Wed, Jan 23, 2013 1:16 PM EST

http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/facebook-making-feel-bad-yourself-181600314.html

We look for affirmations from others to feel good about ourselves when we fail to see our own self worth.