Facebook may harm health
After a long week, if theres not much on TV, you may spend some time on Facebook. Could this decision hurt your health?
A new study suggests it might, though the answer is complicated. Researchers found that liking peoples posts and clicking links posted by friends was associated with worse reports of mental health, physical health and life satisfaction.
The new findings suggest there is likely some level of social media activity and communication over social networking sites [that] is beneficial, but too much probably gets you in trouble, said Thomas Valente, a professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California who was not involved with the study. [Top 10 Golden Rules of Facebook]
The sweet spot for any persons social media use may depend on many factors, including personal traits like age, said Valente, who studies health-promotion programs but was not involved in the new study.
I really applaud these authors for doing this work, [but] theres a lot of work [yet] to be done trying to understand the effects of social networking sites specifically and social media in general, Valente told Live Science.
In the new study, Holly Shakya, an assistant professor of global health at the Univ ersity of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, and her collaborator Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, director of the Human Nature Lab at Yale University,analyzed data from about 5,200 people with an average age of 48 over three time periods. The study participants rated their mental and physical health on a scale of 1 to 4 and life satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, and reported their body mass index (BMI) numbers. The participants also allowed the researchers to access to their Facebook data. In addition to finding that people who gave out more likes had worse health, the researchers found that those who updated their Facebook status more often reported having worse mental health, on average, than those who updated their status less often.
HealthDay
