DO you become restless or troubled if you can’t use Facebook? Do you have an urge to check your newsfeed or responses to your posts whenever you have free time? Do you find yourself spending hours browsing through Facebook every day? If you answered yes to all these questions, chances are you’re already hooked.
To get a more accurate reading, researchers at the University of Bergen in Norway led by Cecilie Andraessen have developed the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale, which asks test subjects to respond to six statements with five possible answers: 1) Very rarely, 2) Rarely, 3) Sometimes, 4) Often and 5) Very often.
The statements are:
1) You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or planning how to use it.
2) You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more.
3) You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems.
4) You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success.
5) You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook.
6) You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job or studies.
Scoring “Often” or “Very often” on at least four of the six items suggests that the respondent is addicted to Facebook, the researchers said.
Curiously, a separate study by Ofir Turel, a psychologist at California State University, found that the brains of people with compulsive urges to use Facebook show some patterns similar to those found in drug addicts.
In particular, LiveScience.com reported, Facebook addicts showed greater activation of brain regions associated with impulsive behavior. Unlike the brains of cocaine addicts, however, Facebook users showed no quieting of brain areas responsible for inhibition.
“They have the ability to control their behavior, but they don’t have the motivation to control this behavior because they don’t see the consequences to be that severe,” Turel said.
For the study, Turel observed how quickly 20 students responded to Facebook cues (logos) versus neutral cues (traffic signs).
The test subjects were then asked to press a button when they saw a Facebook cue, then told to do the same when they saw the neutral cues. All the while, their brain patterns were being monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging.
“We found that a certain brain system called amygdala was hyper-activated in response to Facebook stimuli,” Turel told the Orange County Register. “This correlated with addiction scores.”
The good news, however, was that the inhibition system wasn’t impaired as it would be in drug addicts, Turel said.
“With a drug addiction, you want them to disconnect totally from drugs,” he told the Register. “This is more similar to food addiction because you don’t want to deprive them of the Internet, but teach them how to use it responsibly.”
Doing that might be harder than it sounds, however.
A study from Cornell University published this month in Social Media + Society identified four reasons people who decide to quit Facebook keep going back to it.
Based on data provided by 99daysoffreedom.com, an online campaign that encouraged participants to log off Facebook for 99 days, the study focused on those who tried but returned to Facebook before the 99 days were done.
The four reasons for their reversion, the Cornell Chronicle reported, were:
Perceived addiction – Those who felt 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 10 days, whenever I opened up an Internet browser, my fingers would automatically go to ‘f.’”
Privacy and surveillance – Users who felt their Facebook activity was being monitored were less likely to revert, while those who use Facebook largely to manage how other people think of them are more likely to log back in.
Subjective mood – Researchers found that those who were in a good mood were less likely to renege on their pledge to stay off Facebook.
Other social media – Facebook users were also less likely to log back in if they had other social media outlets – like Twitter, the researchers added.
I take a merely academic interest in all this talk of addiction, of course, since I have stubbornly refused to use Facebook. To paraphrase former US President Bill Clinton, I tried Facebook and didn’t like it–and didn’t inhale. Chin Wong
Column archives at: http://www.chinwong.com