Facebook profiles could raise users’ self-esteem and affect their behaviour

Facebook profiles could raise users` self-esteem and affect their behaviour
Washington: A Facebook profile can provide beneficial psychological effects and influence behaviour, a new study has claimed.

Catalina Toma, a UW-Madison assistant professor of communication arts, used the Implicit Association Test to measure Facebook users' self-esteem after they spent time looking at their profiles.

The test showed that after participants spent just five minutes examining their own Facebook profiles, they experienced a significant boost in self-esteem.

The test measures how quickly participants associate positive or negative adjectives with words like me, my, I and myself.

Facebook profiles could raise users` self-esteem and affect their behaviour



"If you have high self-esteem, then you can very quickly associate words related to yourself with positive evaluations but have a difficult time associating words related to yourself with negative evaluations," Toma said.

"But if you have low self-esteem, the opposite is true," she said.

Additionally, she also investigated whether exposure to one's own Facebook profile affects behaviour.

Facebook profiles could raise users` self-esteem and affect their behaviour

"We wanted to know if there are any additional psychological effects that stem from viewing your own self-enhancing profile," Toma said.

The behaviour examined in the study was performance in a serial subtraction task, assessing how quickly and accurately participants could count down from a large number by intervals of seven.

Toma found that self-esteem boost that came from looking at their profiles ultimately diminished participants' performance in the follow-up task by decreasing their motivation to perform well.

After people spent time on their own profile they attempted fewer answers during the allotted time than people in a control group, but their error rate was not any worse.

She said that the results are consistent with self-affirmation theory, which claims that people constantly try to manage their feelings of self-worth.

"Performing well in a task can boost feelings of self-worth," Toma says. "However, if you already feel good about yourself because you looked at your Facebook profile, there is no psychological need to increase your self-worth by doing well in a laboratory task."

The study is set to be published in Media Psychology.

ANI

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