• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, October 6, 2014

There’s been a lot of talk about social media’s negative psychological effects (including in this blog) but it can also help make people feel better about themselves, according to a new study by researchers at Ohio State University. They just have to find someone else who’s even worse off than they are.

The study, titled “Glancing Up or Down: Mood Management and Selective Social Comparisons on Social Networking Sites” and published in Computers in Human Behavior, examined how users’ moods affect their social media behavior, using 168 college students as test subjects. At the beginning of the study the researchers divided the subjects into good and bad mood groups, using criticism or praise from a bogus facial recognition exercise to induce the particular mood. The students were then asked to browse what they were told was a prototype social network for university alumni.

The students were exposed to a total of eight social network profiles which had been manipulated to display varying degrees of physical attractiveness and career success. The actual images were blurred, but ratings for these qualities were displayed for each profile, based on supposed peer evaluations; thus the subjects could choose, consciously or unconsciously, to look at profiles of successful, attractive people or unsuccessful, unattractive people.

The researchers found that subjects who had been put in a negative mood before browsing the profiles tended to spend more time looking at the profiles of unsuccessful people with low ratings for attractiveness and career success, while subjects who were in a positive mood were more likely to look at the profiles of successful people.

The authors summed up the basic dynamic: “Participants appeared motivated to repair their affective states through selective exposure to downward comparisons that could restore their mood and through selective avoidance of upward comparisons that could lead to further self-deflation and mood damage.”

Social media is clearly tied to issues of self-esteem and self image, and at least sometimes provides a way for users to manage their own psychological equilibrium. Previously, another study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Cornell University, titled “Self-affirmation underlies Facebook use” and published in the March issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, examined how subjects responded to negative criticism of their performance in a test (involving public speaking) after viewing either their own Facebook profile or a stranger’s Facebook profile. The researchers found that subjects who viewed their own Facebook profile before taking the test were more likely to be receptive to criticism and less likely to try to blame someone else for their supposedly poor performance.