Almost everyone has such online friends. It takes a lot of patience not to remove them from your list of friends, because such publications in the news feed, let’s be honest, are annoying – both in quantity and in content. Well, you love each other, and to your health, but why blow it all over the Internet?
Albums of dozens of photographs in which happy He and She are kissing, holding hands, walking through the park, or cooing at a table in a cafe. Exclamations: “I thought it only happens in the movies!”, “I have never been so happy!!”, “May this fairy tale never end!!!” – and a sea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXblikes, hearts, emoticons and enthusiastic comments on each other’s pages. Why do they do it?
This was tried to find out by a team of scientists from Albright College in Reading (USA), led by psychologist Gwendolyn Seidman. They studied a group of volunteers with romantic relationships ranging from one month to 30 years. The subjects reported on the degree of satisfaction with their relationship, as well as on the Internet habits associated with a partner: the publication of joint photos, the regularity of visiting each other’s pages on social networks, the tendency to like and comment on activity on these pages.
In parallel, the participants of the experiment took tests in which they had to evaluate their traits, known in psychology as the “big five” qualities that determine a person’s personality: extraversion / introversion, goodwill, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience.
The first conclusion of the study turned out to be quite predictable. People with low self-esteem are more prone to online demonstration of love feelings. More precisely, those of them whose self-esteem is highly dependent on the opinions of others. For such people, social approval is extremely important. Demonstrating in social networks that their relationship is in perfect order, they thereby seek to show that they themselves are in perfect order.
Another result obtained became less obvious. As it turned out, introverts show their romantic feelings on social networks more than extroverts. In a sense, this contradicts the findings of several previous studies, which have shown that extroverts are also more active and sociable on the Internet.
However, Gwendolyn Seidman suggests that the explanation may be that extroverts are more able (and more skillful) to talk about their love relationships in direct, real communication. Introverts, on the other hand, whose social circle is obviously narrower, are more comfortable talking about such an intimate sphere as romantic feelings online.
Finally, one more conclusion, which, perhaps, will soften the skeptics and make them look at the publications of friends full of love tenderness more condescendingly. The study showed that people who tend to demonstrate their love relationships in social networks, and in real life, were more satisfied with these relationships. In other words, “sweet” photos, passionate mutual confessions and incessant “likes” to each other do not necessarily mean that their authors seek to increase self-esteem or are embarrassed to express their feelings in real life. They are probably just very, very happy.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/are-lovey-dovey-facebook-couples-all-they-seem?ret=/articles/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180765/