But in practice, people with low self-esteem seem to behave counterproductively, bombarding their friends with negative tidbits about their lives and making themselves less likeable, according to a new study which will be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“We had this idea that Facebook could be a really fantastic place for people to strengthen their relationships,” says Amanda Forest, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo. She cowrote the new study with her advisor, Joanne Wood. The two are generally interested in self-esteem, and how self-esteem affects the kinds of emotions people express. People with low self-esteem are often uncomfortable sharing face-to-face, but Facebook makes it possible to share remotely.

In one study, Forest and Wood asked students how they feel about Facebook. People with low self-esteem were more likely to think that Facebook provided an opportunity to connect with other people, and to perceive it as a safe place that reduces the risk of awkward social situations.

The researchers also investigated what students actually wrote on Facebook. They asked the students for their last 10 status updates, sentences like, “[Name] is lucky to have such terrific friends and is looking forward to a great day tomorrow!” and “[Name] is upset b/c her phone got stolen :@.” These are visible to their Facebook friends, the people in their network.

Each set of status updates was rated for how positive or negative it was. For each set of statements, a coder – an undergraduate Facebook user – rated how much they liked the person who wrote them.

People with low self-esteem were more negative than people with high self-esteem – and the coders liked them less. The coders were strangers, but that’s realistic, Forest says. In earlier research, Wood and Forest found that nearly half of Facebook friends are actually strangers or acquaintances, not close friends.

Forest and Wood also found that people with low self-esteem get more responses from their real Facebook friends when they post highly positive updates, compared to less positive ones. People with high self-esteem, on the other hand, get more responses when they post negative items, perhaps because these are rarer for them.

So people with low self-esteem may feel safe making personal disclosures on Facebook – but they may not be helping themselves. “If you’re talking to somebody in person and you say something, you might get some indication that they don’t like it, that they’re sick of hearing your negativity,” Forest says. But when people have a negative reaction to a post on Facebook, they seem to keep it to themselves. “On Facebook, you don’t see most of the reactions.”

Paper surveys and formal consultations can be seen as a bit of a turn off to young people but students at Queen Elizabeth School, Kirkby Lonsdale in Cumbria have been giving their views about their local area in a different way.

A specially-designed interactive display has been installed in their school library by computing researchers from Lancaster’s ICT centre of excellence InfoLab21, in collaboration with the University of Oulu, Finland. The screen enables young people to upload photos of themselves and express their views about their town, in an intuitive, user-friendly way.

So far, around 200 responses have been gathered ranging from pleas for more access to fishing on the Lune to teen-friendly cafes and more affordable leisure activities. The results will be fed back to the town council as part of a broader community consultation.

Professor Awais Rashid of Lancaster University is leading the project.

He said: “Over the last ten years networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, Twitter and Flicker have changed the shape of our social world. Yet there is still a lack of understanding of how to effectively leverage social media to engage citizens on an ultra-large-scale, especially when it comes to addressing sensitive issues.

“Young people familiar with the instant flow of information and ideas are less likely to fill in a questionnaire or survey. We wanted to design something that felt comfortable for young people to use so their voices could be heard. This project goes beyond crowd sourcing. It looks at how we can leverage the potential of online social media to bring communities closer and help them work together in dealing with key local issues that affect them.”

The material will be recorded and displayed in public online forums, such as FaceBook or Twitter.

Subsequent users can comment and update the photos and comments.

Year ten QES student Michael Harkness said the screen had been popular with his peers. “It’s appealing because it’s not just a piece of paper, the screens are a lot more fun which makes you want to use them. It’s a more interesting way of giving our opinions and less pressured. It’s interesting reading about what other people think of the town.”

Deputy Head Teacher Lisa Longley said the project gelled with their school’s values of community engagement: “One of our ten school values is getting involved in community activity whether that is within the school community or the wider community where we live.

“The students love the interactivity of the screens, it is a way they can express their views or opinions and have their say in a less formal, more interesting and fun way. The information is coming from a wider selection of students who have not yet expressed their views on this topic in
any other way.

“As an offshoot to this, it has increased footfall in our library where the screen lives, a winner all round.”

The work in Kirkby Lonsdale is part of an 18-month, EPSRC-funded project called ‘YouDesignIt’ which is revisiting the web to find fresh ways of enabling communities to report and solve problems.

The project, which brings together computing experts, sociologists and psychologists, will ultimately produce blueprints for next-generation online social networking mechanisms with community responsibility and empowerment at their core.

“Even though parents and clinicians have often observed that children with ASD tend to be preoccupied with screen-based media, ours is the first large-scale study to explore this issue,” said Micah Mazurek, assistant professor in the School of Health Professions and the Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. “We found that 64 percent of adolescents with ASD spent most of their free time watching TV and playing video and computer games. These rates were much higher than among those with other types of disabilities. On the other hand, adolescents with ASD were less likely to spend time using email and social media.”

The majority of youths with ASD (64.2 percent) spend most of their free time using solitary, or non-social, screen-based media (television and video games) while only 13.2 percent spend time on socially interactive media (email, internet chatting).

This is the first study to examine the prevalence of screen-based media use within a large nationally representative sample of youths with ASD. Data were compiled from the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2, a group of more than 1,000 adolescents enrolled in special education. The study includes youths with ASD, learning and intellectual disabilities, and speech and language impairments.

The findings affirm that solitary screen-based media use represents a primary and preferred activity for a large percentage of youths with ASD, Mazurek said. Previously, researchers found that excessive use of these media in typically developing children is detrimental to outcomes, with regard to academic performance, social engagement, behavioral regulation, attention and health.

“This is an important issue for adolescents with ASD and their families. Studies have shown that excessive use of TV and video games can have negative long-term effects for typically developing children,” Mazurek said. “In future studies, we need to learn more about both positive and negative aspects of media use in children with ASD. We need to look for ways to capitalize on strengths and interests in screen-based technology.”

Mazurek is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Psychology. The study was co-authored by Paul Shattuck, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University; Mary Wagner, principal scientist at SRI International, an independent, nonprofit research institute; and Benjamin Cooper, a graduate student at the Brown School.

The study, “Prevalence and Correlates of Screen-Based Media Use Among Youths with Autism Spectrum Disorders,” is published in the current issue of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. The research was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and the Organization for Autism Research.

Published in the journal Review of Educational Research, the findings gathered by Concordia University researchers suggest that technology delivers content and supports student achievement.

Expanded from a doctoral thesis by Rana Tamim, the study’s first author, the research brought together data from 60,000 elementary school, high school, and post-secondary students. It compared achievement in classrooms that used computer technology versus those that used little or none.

In those classrooms where computers were used to support teaching, the technology was found to have a small to moderate positive impact on both learning and attitude. “We deduce that the impact would be even greater if observed over a student’s entire educational experience,” says co-author Richard Schmid, chair of Concordia’s Department of Education and a member of the university’s Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance.

The research team found technology works best when students are encouraged to think critically and communicate effectively. “A standard PowerPoint presentation will most likely not enhance the learning experience beyond providing content or enhancing teacher-directed lectures or class discussions,” says Schmid.

The team now plans to evaluate what technologies work best for what subjects. “Educational technology is not a homogenous intervention, but provides a broad variety of tools and strategies for learning,” says Schmid, adding there are few resources available to keep teachers abreast of newer technologies and their potential.

“Teachers across Quebec are not particularly familiar with the use of technology to promote learning,” he stresses. “The problem is compounded by the fact that children are increasingly more adept with computers. One of the mandates of Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance at Concordia is to support teachers and provide the tools to facilitate the integration of technology into their classrooms.”

The three year research study, which will investigate our ‘Super-Identity’, aims to tackle the issues associated with unreliable and counterfeit identification and provide a faster and more efficient way of combatting the problem.

Psychologist Dr Sarah Stevenage, Head of Psychology at the University of Southampton, who is leading the project, explains: ‘The capacity to identify one another is vitally important. It underpins social dialogue, commercial transactions, individual entitlements to goods and services, and issues of legal and criminal responsibility. In today’s society, each of these activities can take place both within the real world and the cyber world, making the concept of identity and the process of identification, more challenging than ever before.”

Recent findings from the National Fraud Authority (Oct 2010), which is part of the Home Office, estimate that the risks of identity fraud, and its knock-on effects, cost the UK more than £2.7 billion a year. Researchers hope the Super-Identity project, which is a collaboration between the universities of Southampton, Bath, Dundee, Kent, Leicester, Oxford, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (USA), will provide an enterprising and unique solution to this crime.

Dr Stevenage adds: “With the problems associated with identity-fraud becoming ever more of a financial burden to individuals and to society as a whole, we believe that the benefits from this research will be substantial. With better tools for human identification, we will be more able to successfully protect our personal privacy and data security, whilst improving our ability to identify the true suspect in crimes against society.”

The assumption underlying the Super-Identity project is that whilst there may be many dimensions to an individual’s identity – some more reliable than others -, all should ultimately reference back to a single core identity or a ‘Super-Identity’.

By collating real-world and online identities, (such as measures of the face, walk, voice, or internet behaviour), the project seeks to find out how to recognise this core identity more effectively.

The first stage of the project is to define the set of identity measures across a diverse demographic of the population. In light of the potential impact upon our fundamental human rights, social, legal and ethical concerns cannot be ignored. As such these aspects shall also be examined, with particular attention paid to privacy and data protection issues. Once this framework is in place, extensive testing will be conducted to determine the accuracy and reliability of automated and human identification from each measure, and from the combination of measures, in order to provide an identity decision in which you can have confidence.

The £1.85 million project is funded by EPSRC under the Global Uncertainties Programme, and is supported by the United States Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, under its Visualization and Data Analytics Program. The research team includes experts from automated biometrics, psychology, forensic anthropology, human-computer interaction, mathematical modelling, complex data visualisation and IT law.

These are the key findings from a study that Chartered Psychologist Rob Bailey, from OPP, presented to delegates at the British Psychological Society’s Annual Occupational Psychology Conference at the Crowne Plaza hotel, Chester, on Thursday 12 January 2012.

The study concludes that companies who use social networking sites (SNS) to vet potential new employees are at risk of falling foul of employment and data protection laws.

SNS screening has the potential to result in a charge of discrimination. How?  It could be used to weed out a job applicant for reasons outlawed under anti-discrimination laws, for example, because of their colour, gender or age. Knowing that a company has checked out their social networking page, an unsuccessful applicant might allege that the decision to reject them was based on subjective biases, rather than sound work-related criteria. If an SNS search is done before an employment offer, without a policy to guide it, it is highly likely to be done in private and not recorded; these are conditions where bias and discrimination are more likely to occur.

The online study conducted between February and March 2011, analysed a nationally representative sample of over 1000 people of working age in the UK & Ireland. Personality was also measured using the 16PF personality questionnaire.

People might be shocked to find how often employers search SNS for information about them during the hiring process. In the present study 65 per cent of respondents said they were likely to look at a potential employee’s online presence prior to interviewing them.

To organisations that choose to run the risk of using social networking sites in their recruitment process, Rob Bailey has some advice, “Prepare a clear company policy based on sound legal advice. This should include such policies as not adding an applicant as a friend in order to investigate their background, as this would risk breaching data protection legislation.”

His advice to potential candidates, “Lock down your Facebook privacy settings completely! Or if you don’t do this, make sure any level of information you share is appropriate for the social media image that you are trying to create. Twitter is completely public; only share things that support the reputation that you are trying to create. Use LinkedIn like a professional networking event – your profile is your CV and your discussions are places for professional, respectful conversations.”

Social networking sites are not naturally respectful of privacy, reputation and control. As etiquette, expectations, policies and laws for SNS use evolve, employers and employees need to take utmost care over their use of SNS.

Psychologist Richard Balding, from the University of Worcester, presents the findings from this study Thursday 12 January 2012, at the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology Conference, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Chester.

The study found that stress was associated with the personal use of smart phones but not with work.  In particular, a relationship was found between stress and the amount of times the phone was checked, with the most stressed amongst us experiencing ‘phantom’ vibrations when in fact there have been no alerts.

A questionnaire and a psychometric stress check were administered to over 100 participants including university students and employees from a range of occupations including retail and the public sector.

The study established the existence of a helpful-stressful cycle; it found that a device is typically acquired to help an individual manage their work load. However, once the individual starts to use their smart phone the work load management benefits are displaced by the pressure to keep abreast with their new expanded virtual social life. The more an individual becomes stressed and worried the more compulsive behaviours such as checking will occur.

Richard Balding advises organisations to consider this problem seriously, “Smart phone use is increasing at a rapid rate and we are likely to see an associated increase in stress from social networking. Organisations will not flourish if their employees are stressed, irrespective of the source of stress, so it is in their interest to encourage their employees to switch their phones off; cut the number of work emails sent out of hours, reduce people’s temptation to check their devices.”

The study compared the cognitive functions for 32 elderly participants before and after four weeks of playing a computer game, either Brain Age or Tetris, for 15 minutes per day, at least five days a week.

At the end of the four weeks, the researchers found that the Brain Age players showed small improvement in their executive functions and processing speeds, but other cognitive functions were unchanged.

According to the researchers, led by Rui Nouchi of Tohoku University in Japan, where the Brain Age game was created, the relatively short training time used in the study suggests that it may be possible to improve some cognitive functions quite rapidly.

“Research has shown that writing a personal diary and other forms of expressive writing are a great way to release emotional distress and just feel better,” said the study’s lead author, Meyran Boniel-Nissim, PhD, of the University of Haifa, Israel. “Teens are online anyway, so blogging enables free expression and easy communication with others.”

Maintaining a blog had a stronger positive effect on troubled students’ well-being than merely expressing their social anxieties and concerns in a private diary, according to the article published online in the APA journal Psychological Services. Opening the blog up to comments from the online community intensified those effects.

“Although cyberbullying and online abuse are extensive and broad, we noted that almost all responses to our participants’ blog messages were supportive and positive in nature,” said the study’s co-author, Azy Barak, PhD. “We weren’t surprised, as we frequently see positive social expressions online in terms of generosity, support and advice.”

The researchers randomly surveyed high school students in Israel, who had agreed to fill out a questionnaire about their feelings on the quality of their social relationships. A total of 161 students — 124 girls and 37 boys, with an average age of 15 — were selected because their scores on the survey showed they all had some level of social anxiety or distress. All the teens reported difficulty making friends or relating to the friends they had. The researchers assessed the teens’ self-esteem, everyday social activities and behaviors before, immediately after and two months after the 10-week experiment.

Four groups of students were assigned to blog. Two of those groups were told to focus their posts on their social problems, with one group opening the posts to comments; the other two groups could write about whatever they wanted and, again, one group opened the blog up to comments. The number and content of comments were not evaluated for this experiment. The students could respond to comments but that was not required. Two more groups acted as controls – either writing a private diary about their social problems or doing nothing. Participants in the writing and blogging groups were told to post messages at least twice a week for 10 weeks.

Four experts, who held master’s or doctoral degrees in counseling and psychology, assessed the bloggers’ social and emotional condition via their blog posts. Students were assessed as having a poor social and emotional state if they wrote extensively about personal problems or bad relationships or showed evidence of low self-esteem, for example.

Self-esteem, social anxiety, emotional distress and the number of positive social behaviors improved significantly for the bloggers when compared to the teens who did nothing and those who wrote private diaries. Bloggers who were instructed to write specifically about their difficulties and whose blogs were open to comments improved the most. All of these results were consistent at the two month follow-up.

The authors conceded that the skewed sex ratio was a limitation to the study. However, the researchers analyzed the results separately by gender and found that boys and girls reacted similarly to the interventions and there were no major differences. However, they say future research should attempt to control for gender.

The gross domestic product of the United States — that oft-cited measure of economic health — has been ticking upward for the last two years.

But what would you see if you could see a graph of gross domestic happiness?

A team of scientists from the University of Vermont have made such a graph — and the trend is down.

Reporting in the Dec. 7 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, the team writes, “After a gradual upward trend that ran from January to April, 2009, the overall time series has shown a gradual downward trend, accelerating somewhat over the first half of 2011.”

“It appears that happiness is going down,” said Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician at UVM and the lead author on the new study.

How does he know this? From Twitter. For three years, he and his colleagues gathered more than 46 billion words written in Twitter tweets by 63 million Twitter users around the globe.

In these billions of words is not a view of any individual’s state of mind. Instead, like billions of moving atoms add up to the overall temperature of a room, billions of words used to express what people are feeling resolve into a view of the relative mood of large groups.

These billions of words contain everything from “the” to “pancakes” to “suicide.” To get a sense of the emotional gist of various words, the researchers used a service from Amazon called Mechanical Turk. On this website, they paid a group of volunteers to rate, from one to nine, their sense of the “happiness” — the emotional temperature — of the ten thousand most common words in English. Averaging their scores, the volunteers rated, for example, “laughter” at 8.50, “food” 7.44, “truck” 5.48, “greed” 3.06 and “terrorist” 1.30.

The Vermont team then took these scores and applied them to the huge pool of words they collected from Twitter. Because these tweets each have a date and time, and, sometimes, other demographic information — like location — they show changing patterns of word use that provide insights into the way groups of people are feeling.

The new approach lets the researchers measure happiness at different scales of time and geography — whether global patterns over a workweek — or on Christmas.

And stretched out over the last three years, these patterns of word use show a drop in average happiness.

Or at least at drop in happiness for those who use Twitter. “It does skew toward younger people and people with smartphones and so on — but Twitter is nearly universal now,” Dodds said, “Every demographic is represented.”

“Twitter is a signal,” Dodds said, “just like looking at the words in the New York Times or Google Books.” (Word sources that the team is also exploring in related studies). “They’re all a sample,” he says. “And indeed everything we say or write is a distortion of what goes on inside our head.”

But — like GDP is a distortion of the hugely complex interactions that make up the economy and yet is still useful — the new approach by the UVM team provides a powerful sense of the rising and falling pulse of human feelings.

“Individual happiness is a fundamental societal metric,” the researchers write in their study. Indeed the ultimate goal of much public policy is to improve and protect happiness. But measuring happiness has been exceedingly difficult by traditional means, like self-reporting in social science surveys. Some of the problems with this approach are that people often don’t tell the truth in surveys and the sample sizes are small.

And so efforts to measure happiness have been “overshadowed by more readily quantifiable economic indicators such as gross domestic product,” the study notes.

The new approach lets the UVM researchers almost instantaneously look over the “collective shoulder of society,” Dodds says. “We get a sense of the aggregate expressions of millions of people,” says Dodds’s colleague Chris Danforth, a mathematician and a co-author the study, while they are communicating in a “more natural way,” he says. And this opens the possibility of taking regular measures of happiness in near real-time — measurements that could have applications in public policy, marketing and other fields.

The study describes hundreds of insights from the Twitter data, like a clear weekly happiness signal “with the peak generally occurring over the weekend, and the nadir on Monday and Tuesday,” they write. And over each day happiness seems to drop from morning to night. “It’s part of the general unraveling of the mind that happens over the course of the day,” said Dodds.

In the long-term graph that shows an overall drop in happiness, various ups and downs are clearly visible. While the strongest up-trending days are annual holidays like Christmas and Valentine’s Day, “all the most negative days are shocks from outside people’s routines,” Dodds say. Clear drops can be seen with the spread of swine flu, announcement of the U.S. economic bailout, the tsunami in Japan and even the death of actor Patrick Swayze.

“In measuring happiness, we construct a tunable, real-time, remote sensing, and non-invasive, text-based hedonometer,” the Vermont scientists write. In other words, a happiness sensor.

Right now the sensor is only available to the researchers, but Dodds, Danforth and their colleagues have in mind a tool that could go “on the dashboard” of policy makers, Dodds says. Or, perhaps, on a real estate website for people exploring communities into which they might move, or, simply, “if someone is flying in a plane they could look at this dashboard and see how the city below them is feeling,” he says.

Of course feelings change quickly and the nature of happiness itself is one of the most complex, profound issues of human experience.

“There is an important psychological distinction between an individual’s current, experiential happiness and their longer term, reflective evaluation of their life,” the scientists write, “and in using Twitter, our approach is tuned to the former kind.”

And looking ahead, the Vermont scientists hope that by following the written expressions of individual Twitter users over long time periods, they’ll be able to infer details of happiness dynamics “such as individual stability, social correlation and contagion and connections to well-being and health.”

Dodds and his colleagues are no strangers to the debates over the role of happiness that can be traced back through Brave New World to Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Aquinas, and Aristotle. “By measuring happiness, we’re not saying that maximizing happiness is the goal of society,” Dodds says. “It might well be that we need to have some persistent degree of grumpiness for cultures to flourish.”

Nevertheless, this study provides a new view on a compelling question: why does happiness seem to be declining?