Updating Facebook status makes us less lonely

If you want to get rid of the feeling of loneliness, constantly updating Facebook status is one of the ways to achieve that goal.

Fenne Deters, a psychologist of Berlin University in Germany, recruited 100 students to perform an experiment. All of these students are members of the Facebook social network. The team asked them to fill out a form to self-assess their loneliness, happiness or stress. Then the group of students made friends with a Facebook account created by the researchers, Livescience reported.

Facebook updates help reduce loneliness

The team monitored the level of student status updates in a week. They then asked some students to update their status more frequently than other students within the next 7 days. In the following week, every student must reveal their mood every evening by answering the questions in the survey.

The results show that the level of loneliness of students who update their status is much lower than those who do not update regularly. However, their level of happiness and stress remains unchanged.

"It shows that status updates only have an impact on feeling lonely , " the team concluded.

An interesting point is that the degree of loneliness of each student does not depend on the number of comments (comments) or "Likes" under each status.

"Someone might assume that people won't comment or click the Like button because they don't care about your state. But the status update itself helps us feel closer to people, so they I feel less lonely , "the team said.