Lonely on Facebook

Many of the jewels of the APS convention can be found in the several Poster Sessions–often the work of graduate students and their mentors. One Sunday morning poster was unique in its collaboration–a mother-daughter effort. Cal Poly psychology professor Laura Freberg and daughter Karen Freberg, a doctoral candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, presented data from an exploratory study of loneliness and social networking. The Frebergs (together with Ben Ainley, Rebecca Adams and Cristina Enrique of Caly Poly) compared lonely college students with not-so-lonely students, and found that those who were lonely in “real life” also had fewer “friends” on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

This finding runs contrary to the theory that lonely students use social networks to compensate for their lonely lives–or that they put on a happy face online. The lonely students also viewed social networkers more negatively than the less lonely students did: “Like children picked last for a softball team,” the researchers conclude, “lonely students might be devaluing an activity in which they feel rejection or exclusion.” The mother-daughter researchers are both enthusiastic Facebook networkers.

-Wray Herbert