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Did you know that relying on social media for news can . . .cause you more stress? Exposure to high rates of conflicting information, which you find on social media, during an emergency is linked to increased levels of stress, and those who rely on text messages or social media reports from unofficial sources are more frequently exposed to rumors and experience greater distress, according to research led by the University of California, Irvine, newswise.com reports.  “During a crisis situation, like a school shooting or lock-down, people often seek to stay informed about what’s happening. However, when announcements and updates from official channels are lacking or irregular, there’s a high risk that rumors will fill the void,” says principal investigator Roxane Cohen Silver, UCI professor of psychology & social behavior. “We wanted to explore how people coped with ambiguity during a campus lockdown and how a communications vacuum could lead to rumor generation, rumor tran...

The economy is booming.  Stocks are through the roof.  And your neighbor, who just got a great new job, is putting a pool in the backyard. Progress is great.  Unless, of course, it's not happening for you, according to newswise.com. Economic progress can cause people to feel dispossessed and angry if they don’t feel like they are also advancing, a new study notes. “The results indicate that a booming economy may not be the incumbent government’s sole insurance against loss of public support,” says  Cecilia Hyunjung Mo  of Vanderbilt University, one of three authors of the study, “ Economic Development, Mobility, and Political Discontent."   “People must feel they are doing well and sharing society’s success.” The study was conducted using face-to-face interviews in 2013-2014 in Pakistan, covering 2,090 households in 76 villages in the Punjab, Sidh and Kyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) provinces. Subjects were divided into four groups. Those primed into vi...

Would you send your boss a link, or ask him to friend you?  What if you worked in Israel?  Or China? A new study is examining the cultural differences in social media use in four countries. Some faculty members at NYIT (New York Institute of Technology) School of Management have won a $100,000 grant to examine how cultural dimensions affect the way people use social media to interact with work colleagues. They will investigate work relationships and social media in four countries: the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), China, Israel, and Canada.  The study scores national cultures on six “dimensions," including power distance, which is the cultural acceptance of unequal power relations (high score) versus people who question authority (low); individuality, the value a culture places on either individual preferences (high score) or collective needs (low), and uncertainty avoidance, a cultural value in favor of certainty and a single, shared Truth (high score), a...

It certainly comes as no surprise but social media sites interfere with children's moral development. According to a new study, a "parent poll" carried out in the UK found that only 15% of parents thought that popular social media sites, such as Facebook, provided a positive influence on a young person’s character, while 40% of parents said they were "concerned" or "extremely concerned" about the negative and potentially harmful impact of social media. Even though it was carried out in the UK, it holds true for this country, as well.  The UK-wide poll questioned over 1,700 parents of children aged 11 to 17. Of those parents questioned, 93% said they were regular social media users, newswise.com reports. Researchers carried out this poll to gauge parents’ perceptions around the influence of social media on children’s character. The survey, which is the first of its type in the UK, provides a unique insight into the moral values that are...

Face threats  Do you know what that is?  I'd never heard the term before and it confused me a little.  Until I realized it meant what people think about you on social media. There's another phrase, too.  Impression management.  That's a little easier to understand.  Impression management refers to an individual's deliberate efforts to control or influence other people's perceptions. Sometimes impression management occurs in reaction to face threats: unfavorable incidents that undercut a person's ability to cultivate and maintain a desirable self-image on social networking sites (SNSs). You know?  Like bragging about your new boyfriend who's a doctor and your friend posts that he's really a dentist.  That happened to me.   SNSs such as Facebook, where content can be shared widely and is often persistent, studies have repeatedly shown that people are vulnerable to face threats resulting from things that others post, according ...

Now this is weird. You know all those people who are constantly checking Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all those other texting sites? Well, they're not just annoying.  They may be sleep-deprived. It's an odd correlation but a new study links compulsive Facebook checking to lack of sleep. Say what? Apparently, University of California, Irvine, researchers have found that, if you find yourself toggling over to look at Facebook several dozen times a day, it’s not necessarily because the experience of being on social media is so wonderful. It may be a sign that you’re not getting enough sleep, according to newswise.com. n a recently completed study, researchers at the University of California, Irvine demonstrated that lack of sleep – in addition to affecting busy college students’ moods and productivity – leads to more frequent online activities such as browsing Facebook. “When you get less sleep, you’re more prone to distraction,” says lead researcher...

Want some reasons to break up with Facebook?  Experts say there are four but I'm sure you can think of many more.  The time your (ex) fiance changes his listing back to "single" (and this is before he tells you!). The time you learned (as I have, many times) about the parties your kid's not invited to.  The endless stream of kids making high honors, or slugging the winning ball or hot beach vacations when you were just jumped by a loose dog and had your cell phone stolen, to boot (read: me).   New research from Cornell Information Science discovered four reasons why our relationship with Facebook is complicated, according to newswise.com: • Perceived addiction – Those who feel that Facebook is addictive or habitual were more likely to return, according to the group’s research. One participant described this habitual aspect by saying, “In the first ten days, whenever I opened up an Internet browser, my fingers would automatically go to 'f'.” • Priv...

Guess where people like to share good news? A new study has found that, when experiencing positive events, people preferr to share via texting and Twitter, because "both media are easily accessible from smartphones and are non-intrusive in that communication partners don’t have to reply immediately," according to newswise.com. When experiencing negative events, people prefer using the telephone, a more intrusive medium. “You often hear people say when the phone rings, it’s bad news,” study author Catalina Toma, an assistant professor of communication arts at UW-Madison, says at newswise.com.“Our data support that.” The team also found that social sharing via media enhanced the emotional tone of the event. Sharing a positive event increased its impact. “Telling somebody makes you even happier,”she says, adding that “It’s almost like the event is not even real until you tell somebody." But if you feel sad because you had a lousy trip to the dentist...

We've all been saddened by the tragic stories of young people who commit suicide because of online bullying.  But did you know you can also spread depression and disappointment along with euphoria on Facebook? A new study has found that emotions are contagious online, according to newswise.com.  According to a new study by social scientists at Cornell University, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Facebook, emotions can spread among users of online social networks. “People who had positive content experimentally reduced it on their Facebook news feed, for one week, and used more negative words in their status updates,” reports Jeff Hancock, professor of communication at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and co-director of its Social Media Lab. “When news feed negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred: Significantly more positive words were used in peoples’ status updates.” The experiment is the first to suggest ...

So now if you're a college student and a heavy user of the Internet, you could be a junkie, too? That's what a new study is saying, newswise,com reports. It makes sense, I guess.  Addiction is addiction.  “The findings provide significant new insights into the association between Internet use and addictive behavior,” the Web site quotes Dr. Sriram Chellappan, an assistant professor of computer science at Missouri S&T and the lead researcher in the study. In the study, t he subjects’ Internet usage was divided into several categories, including gaming, chatting, file downloading, email, browsing and social networking (Facebook and Twitter). Total scores "exhibited the highest correlations with gaming, chatting and browsing, and the lowest with email and social networking," newswise relates. The researchers also observed that specific symptoms measured by the scale correlated with specific categories of Internet usage. "They found that introversion was...

Hah!  Caught you!  OK. There's homosexual.  Meterosexual.  Now, datasexual ? It's not what you think.  It's obsessive self-trackers, according to Janet Fang at smartplanet.com.  You know them.  They're either posting their dinner photos, then checking compulsively to see who viewed them, or adding comments to someone else's post, and checking them every two minutes. Fang, who references IIIEE Spectrum for the information, writes, they're constantly using social media "not just to enhance self-knowledge but also to embellish self-presentation, especially on social networks." She notes that  Big Think offered this description last year: "They are relentlessly digital, they obsessively record everything about their personal lives, and they think that data is sexy. In fact, the bigger the data, the sexier it becomes. Their lives — from a data perspective, at least — are perfectly groomed." That's another thing.  I hate reading abou...

So now I get it.  It's that electric jolt I get when my views top 75 (OK, only once, but come on, people, tell your friends about this blog!).  Facebook is our high. An op-ed in The Sunday Review put it the best:  we love the instant approval we get when we post something and our friends immediately respond.   The essay was mostly about the bad things Facebook encourages us to do, like pose in a thong, when  mommy panties make more sense, or post how much you hate your boss, or, to me, the worst, deface places like the Grand Canyon or saguaros in the desert just so you can post it online.  But as Jenna Wortham puts it, "That feedback loop of positive reinforcement is the most addictive element of social media." Whether you're a mom posting your son's championship baseball win, or your latest cedar-planked salmon, let's face it.  It feels good when friends come back with praise and accolades. “For people who get a lot of motivation out of knowi...

Great.  Now that the world knows, thanks to the Web, that I fill my prescriptions at Walgreen's, buy my running shoes at New Balance, and order my Christmas flank steak from QVC, it's going to help me lose weight on Facebook. That's right.  According to Health Works Collective, Johnson & Johnson  will use Facebook to "monitor obesity prevalence." Now no one I know would call me obese, so why am I getting this?  Most likely because I visit Weight Watchers' sites, but come on! Quoting a recent study from PLOS ONE, J&J graduate fellow Stephen Shie writes that public health workers can use Facebook to survey the pervasiveness of obesity. Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health "found that higher proportion of the population with activity-related interests on Facebook was associated with a significant lower predicted prevalence of obese and overweight people across the United States metro areas as well as across New York City neig...

In the days I did it, it was looked down upon.  I'm talking about job-hopping.  I grew bored easily and within a year or two, was always ready to move on.  In my 25 years of working, I've had seven jobs -- though five of them were within my first seven years. Today job-hopping is common, if not expected.  And a new article by The New York Times' Steve Lohr tells why the ability to now crunch "big data" is allowing companies to not only get into their customers' minds, but their employees', as well, which is turning out to be almost as important. Joe McKendrick reports at smartplanet.com that, as a result of Lohr's exploration, "some conventional wisdom about worker productivity is already being shattered." The first?  Job-hoppers make great employees.  "A study of 20,000 hourly workers finds 'virtually no distinction in tenure between applicants that had held no jobs in the last five years and applicants that had held many jobs...

I used to think my son only talked to his "girlfriend" (did I mention he'll be 12 in June?) in school.  Then I happened to walk by his computer and saw her on his screen.  They Skype.  About three hours a day.  Then I got it.  It's real.  Kids mostly communicate electronically these days. But Joe McKendrick at smartplanet.com believes there are reasons social media won't completely replace face-to-face interactions.  For one, there's less distraction.  If you're sitting at your computer, you're scanning for emails or googling or watching the news, in addition to talking to someone.  When you're actually with someone, it's harder to do this -- though, Joe, are you living on Mars? Have you never seen a teen texting at the table, while talking to you, or God forbid, driving? Most of McKendrick's points have to do with the office, and meeting in person to do business rather than connecting online.  I have to admit here, it makes sense. ...

I use social media to stay in touch but now a famous heart association is saying that it can help obese kids lose weight. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/schooled_in_sports/2012/12/heart_association_says_social_media_can_help_combat_childhood_obesity.html