Do Our Facebook Friends Make Us Feel Worse? A Study of Social Comparison and Emotion

Jiangmeng Liu; Cong Li; Nick Carcioppolo; Michael North

doi:10.1111/hcre.12090

Do Our Facebook Friends Make Us Feel Worse? A Study of Social Comparison and Emotion

Jiangmeng Liu, Cong Li, Nick Carcioppolo, Michael North

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

People often compare themselves to others to gain a better understanding of the self in a process known as social comparison. The current study discusses how people engage in a social comparison process on Facebook, and how observing content from their Facebook friends may affect their emotions. A 2 (comparison direction) × 2 (relational closeness) × 2 (self-esteem) between-subjects experiment was conducted with 163 adult participants. The results revealed a significant 3-way interaction such that people with high self-esteem would be happier receiving positive information than negative information from their close friends, but the effect would be the opposite if the information was from a distant friend. There was no such difference for people with low self-esteem.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	619-640
Number of pages	22
Journal	Human Communication Research
Volume	42
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/hcre.12090
State	Published - Oct 1 2016

Keywords

Emotion
Facebook
Relational Closeness
Self-Esteem
Social Comparison

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Communication
Developmental and Educational Psychology
Anthropology
Linguistics and Language

Access to Document

10.1111/hcre.12090

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abstract = "People often compare themselves to others to gain a better understanding of the self in a process known as social comparison. The current study discusses how people engage in a social comparison process on Facebook, and how observing content from their Facebook friends may affect their emotions. A 2 (comparison direction) × 2 (relational closeness) × 2 (self-esteem) between-subjects experiment was conducted with 163 adult participants. The results revealed a significant 3-way interaction such that people with high self-esteem would be happier receiving positive information than negative information from their close friends, but the effect would be the opposite if the information was from a distant friend. There was no such difference for people with low self-esteem.",

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