It might appear that if a person is shy it should be easier to disclose their own feelings to close friends than to hundreds of people on the web, but it seems to be the opposite.
“People with low self-esteem might feel more comfortable in this low-risk environment and might therefore share their feelings more freely than they would in person,” Forest says.
She adds: “I think that the reason people with low self-esteem feel comfortable disclosing on Facebook despite the fact that it means sharing with hundreds of others, many of whom are not all that close, is that it feels less risky – less chance of an awkward interaction, and no ability to see how others are spontaneously reacting.”
Three different studies were carried out by Forest and her team.
In the first study, 80 undergraduate students completed questionnaires about their self-esteem, their perception of Facebook and perceived safety of self-disclosing on Facebook. It emerged that for LSE (low self-esteem) students, Facebook was considered a safer context in which to express their emotions.
In the second study, researchers analysed the time spent on Facebook and the status updates of 177 users with an average age of 20. They employed undergraduate students who were Facebook users but not subjects in the study to place each status update on a spectrum of positivity to negativity. It turned out that LSE students were more likely to write status updates that are not considered positively by strangers. As a result, LSE students were less popular.
The third study also analysed the status updates of a group of young Facebook users. However, this time the difference between strangers’ and friends’ reactions was taken into account. This study has shown that friends tend to ignore negative status updates but appreciate and like the positive ones. On the other hand, people who are usually positive will catch friends’ attention with negative comments.
Researchers wondered why LSE sufferers keep behaving in this way even if this behaviour provides no social benefits to them.
“Perhaps expressing negativity has other benefits, such as a sense of physical or mental relief or feeling cared for when they do receive support,” says Forest. “Perhaps people are unable to control the amount of negativity they express when they experience high levels of negative emotion.”
Instead of using Facebook as a special opportunity to socialise, LSE people tend to use it to vent or to grab peoples’ attention in the wrong way. Unfortunately, the negativity shown causes both strangers and friends to dislike them.
The researchers confirmed that they would like to conduct further studies on this topic.
Forest explains: “Ideally, we would also explore whether expressing one’s negative emotions on Facebook (and perhaps receiving some support from Facebook friends) means that people have less need to express their negativity to their ‘real-life’ contacts (friends, relatives, romantic partners) in person, thus relieving these contacts of some of the burden of providing support – which could be an upside to expressing negativity on Facebook.”