Effects Of Social Media
For example, the article Social Media and The Mind mentions a study that was done by researchers at the University of Michigan and KU Leuven in Belgium. They tracked 173 students’ habits over time and found out that, “passive use—browsing news feeds, for example—led to reduced well-being by increasing feelings of envy”(8). Wishing you were somebody else is very dangerous to our mental health and it can lead to symptoms of depression. The same article mentions another study that was published in February 2015 in Computers and Human Behavior where they studied seven hundred and thirty six college students and found out that when Facebook evoked envy, it increased symptoms of depression (8). The use of excessive social media causes different feelings like envy, which is not a positive feeling somebody should have. Reducing the amount of social media someone may use can possibly stop this harmful emotional …show more content…
Self-esteem is how a person feels about himself or herself. In the article Online Social Networking and Mental Health Igor Pantic mentions that self esteem, “ is an important factor in developing and maintaining mental health and overall quality of life” and also says that, “Low self-esteem is associated with the pathogenesis of numerous mental illnesses, including depression, eating disorders, and addiction”(Pantic 653). The use of social media can affect someone’s self esteem because people can view themselves as unattractive after viewing pictures of celebrities on a social media network for countless hours. Igor Pantic also mentions a study that was reported by Mehdizadeh, where 100 Facebook users at the York University provided self-esteem and narcissistic personality self-reports. The final results showed that the people with lower self-esteem were more active online and promoted themselves on their social network profiles. Many of the Facebook activities like the main photo feature was negatively correlated with someone’s self esteem and was measured with Rosenberg Self-Esteem scale (Pantic 653). Facebook features like these are bad because an individuals self-esteem can be damaged depending on how many “likes” somebody got on their main photo. It can cause them to feel unattractive because another person had got way more likes than