• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, January 15, 2015

Although plenty of people have opined that social media can be stressful and emotionally unhealthy (including yours truly) this actually isn’t the case, according to the latest Internet study from Pew Research Center, based on an online survey of 1,801 adults, which also addressed mobile device usage and the impact of the Internet in general. However, there is an emotional cost, especially for women, who report that they are more likely to find out about adverse events in the lives of others and feel sadness as a result -- a phenomenon the authors call “the cost of caring.”

Among other things the study apparently contradicts the conventional wisdom that people feel stress because of continuous connectivity prompting feelings of envy, inferiority, and “fear of missing out.” While the Pew study concedes these feelings may exist, “our typical user does not feel more stress than what he or she would otherwise have experienced, or the social benefit of using these technologies cancels out those additional costs.”

The study addressed gender differences in social media usage and stress. For men the picture is pretty straightforward, as the researchers found “there was no statistical difference in stress levels between men who use social media, cellphones, or the Internet and men who do not use these technologies.”

Meanwhile, for women social media and mobile connectivity have a somewhat paradoxical effect: on one hand women who use Twitter, email, and mobile devices actually reported 21% less stress, on a self-perceived measure, than counterparts who don’t engage in these activities. By way of explanation, the authors speculate that “social sharing of both positive and negative events can be associated with emotional well-being,” and “Twitter may provide women low-demand and easily accessible coping mechanism that is not experienced or taken advantage of by men.”

At the same time, women who use social media were significantly more likely than their peers who don’t use Facebook to be aware of events that happened in the lives of people they knew over the last year, such as hospitalization, death in the family, divorce, being laid off, and so on. Thus a “woman with an average size network of Facebook friends is aware of 13% more stressful events in the lives of her closest social ties… and 14% more stressful events in the lives of her more-distant acquaintances.” Men who use Facebook were 6% more likely to know about these events than men who don’t use Facebook.

Learning about these difficult events in other peoples’ lives also resulted in elevated levels of stress. For example, women who were aware that an acquaintance had experienced a demotion or cut in pay reported 9% more stress in their own lives, and  women reported 5% more stress when someone close experienced a serious accident or was hospitalized. Men only experienced more stress in two scenarios, with stress levels elevated 15% when someone they knew was accused of a crime, and 12% when someone was demoted or got a cut in pay (which could just as easily be interpreted as concern about one’s own situation as feelings of empathy).