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.”

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.

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?

“The vast majority of marketing exposures are experienced under conditions of low attention and little cognitive involvement,” write authors Andrew W. Perkins (University of Western Ontario) and Mark R. Forehand (University of Washington, Seattle). “The current research demonstrates that brand identification can form even in these low-involvement conditions if the brand is merely presented simultaneously with self-related information.”

This concept, called “implicit self-referencing,” suggests that consumers don’t need to own, choose, or endorse a brand to identify with it. The authors believe this occurs because most consumers possess high self-esteem and when brand concepts are linked to consumers’ self-concepts, some of those positive feelings rub off onto the brands.

In one experiment, the authors asked participants to sort fictitious brand names with terms related to “self” or “other”; their attitudes toward the “self” brands were more positive. In another experiment, they found that the effect was stronger for individuals who had higher self-esteem. And in a third study, they demonstrated that the effect occurs when brands are simply presented near consumers’ personal content on a social networking site.

Participants were instructed to compare the interfaces of two social networking sites (Facebook and hi5) while fictitious car ads rotated through banner ads. Later, participants reported that they much preferred brands that had appeared (without them being conscious of it) on their own pages. “These results show that the car brands did not benefit from Facebook directly, but rather from their proximity to the consumers’ personal content.”

“Consumers are increasingly comfortable posting a wealth of personal information online, and such digital extroversion certainly creates opportunities for marketers to effectively target and embed their appeals,” the authors conclude.

The Penn researchers evaluated cardiac arrest- and resuscitation-related Tweets during a month-long period in the spring of 2011 and discovered that users frequently share information about CPR and automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and discuss resuscitation topics in the news. Although their findings indicate that use of the platform to ask questions about cardiac arrest appears to be only in its infancy, the authors suggest that Twitter represents a unique, promising avenue to respond to queries from the public and disseminate information about this leading killer – particularly in the areas of CPR training and lifesaving interventions like therapeutic hypothermia.

“Twitter is an incredible resource for connecting and mobilizing people, and it offers users a way to receive instant feedback and information. The potential applications of social media for cardiac arrest are vast,” says Raina Merchant, MD, MS, an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine and a senior fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. “Health care providers and advocacy groups can push information to the public about CPR training and best practices in cardiac arrest care, and participate in real-time discussions about cardiac arrest issues in the media. Twitter might even be harnessed to save lives in an emergency, by allowing bystanders who respond to cardiac arrests in public places to seek information about the location of the closest AED.”

In one of the new studies, the Penn researchers identified 15,324 tweets involving cardiac arrest specific information. Of those, 14 percent of tweets referenced cardiac arrest events, with 5 percent of those messages relating personal experiences with the condition (such as, “when I or a family member/friend had a cardiac arrest”) and 9 percent representing users sharing information relating to arrest locations and treatment interventions and guidelines. Twenty nine percent of tweets referenced CPR performance or AED use, with 23 percent of those messages involving personal stories about real-life performance of CPR or classroom training in the technique and likes/dislikes regarding CPR/AED courses. Six percent of the CPR/AED-related messages referenced what the researchers termed “information sharing,” such as observations about someone giving CPR or using an AED in a public place, or commentary about the new “hands-only” CPR guidelines for bystanders. Nearly 60 percent of the tweets related to health education – such as advocacy group and training events – and the sharing of cardiac arrest-related news articles about celebrities, athletes, and young adults affected by the condition.

In a second study, the researchers sought to understand what types of questions the public is asking about cardiac arrest on Twitter, in hopes to providing clues for how health care professionals can participate in the discussion to provide reliable information. They found that, during the month of tweets surveyed, users asked only about five questions each day. But the topics they queried about, the authors note, represent rich opportunities for public education and outreach to the broader Twitter user community.

Among the cardiac arrest-related questions identified over the course of the study, 21 percent were queries about symptoms, risk factors, prognosis, the difference between cardiac arrest and heart attack, treatment options, and the use of therapeutic hypothermia. Thirty-nine percent of question tweets identified were related to CPR, including guidelines for its use, proper technique, details about certification classes, and accuracy of media portrayal of resuscitation. Forty percent of queries pertained to AEDs – costs, device safety and batteries, availability, proper use, and effectiveness.

When nearly 40 million Nigerians took to the polls last April to elect a new president, many of them went online to share comments about their chosen candidates on blogs, Twitter or other social media platforms. They also used these new media tools to report what they saw. “Listening” to much of it was Georgia Tech Associate Professor Michael Best, which just might have saved a few lives.

During the election, Best provided technical support for a Nigerian group that wanted to use social media as a means for tracking the election process and identifying any problems that cropped up. Best and his team of researchers designed a social media aggregator tool that could pull content from about 20 different sources (including Twitter) and analyze the data in real time using keywords.

At the peak of activity, the aggregator tracked about 50 reports per second and analyzed them based on keywords and (sometimes) location data. The Nigerian Social Media Tracking Centre, formed just before the election by the organization Best was supporting, forwarded along confirmable reports of election irregularities and ultimately reports of violence to Nigerian authorities. All together the aggregator collected about 750,000 reports containing pre-identified keywords, and following the election the SMTC issued a summary report that listed a series of recommendations for using social media and instant messaging to improve future election experiences, such as:

• Training civilian groups and voters to tweet election results
• Organizing SMS group accounts for both national and local election officials
• Establishing a central database to collate election results, and having local precincts send results via SMS
• Advising international monitoring organizations to partner with domestic groups that will monitor social media

Using social media as a means to gauge public response to political events is nothing new, but Best’s team is one of the first to use the practice in real time to help improve the electoral process itself, acknowledging that civilian reports can provide critical information. If violence erupts, the hours or even minutes saved by having identified the situation through social media posts could make a significant difference in response.

“Nigeria showed that this technology has legitimate and useful applications for monitoring elections or keeping a real-time pulse on any number of political or community issues,” said Best, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing and the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. “Our ultimate goal is to delve deeper into the particulars of this, examining the information’s accuracy, depth, timeliness and scope, and comparing it along those dimensions to other sources of information.”

Tangibly, Best and team want to produce open-source software that can be used to monitor major events as a complementary tool to traditional monitoring techniques. For example, the National Democratic Institute and the European Union both sent observers to Nigeria for its April elections, and today Liberia will likewise see international teams on the ground, monitoring and reporting on the country’s electoral processes. How can crowdsourced election data compliment the work of trained formal observer missions? What impact will that data have? And what impact will Friday’s announcement that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will receive the Nobel Peace Prize have on the election?

“The nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] that do election monitoring are understandably leery of formally using this technology right now, because they don’t want to risk their data being tainted with unreliable citizen reports,” said Thomas Smyth, a Ph.D. student in Best’s lab. “However our research could open up new understandings of how social media function in election-like situations, and as the explosion of social media causes NGOs to refine their policies, it could be of interest to them.”

The stakes for Liberia’s election appeared to rise again on Friday, when it was announced that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will receive the Nobel Peace Prize. When the polls open at approximately 3 a.m. EST on Oct. 11, Best and a team of undergraduate and graduate students will be ready in a “situation room” on the Georgia Tech campus. Among the outlets to be followed are Twitter, Facebook public groups, SMS messaging and several other blogs and social media websites, including the open-source platform Ushahidi, popular in several African nations.

As reports begin to filter in, the aggregator will use posts clustering around certain keywords as evidence in a real-time organic catalogue of “curated incidents.” If the team identifies a situation it decides should be reported to Liberian authorities, Best has partnered with iLab Liberia, an information technology support organization, which will staff a “response room” in country.

“Social media and aggregate text messaging can, in a very real sense, be construed as a ‘cultural consciousness,’ and our goal is to show how you can take advantage of that for reasons other than marketing products or identifying pop culture trends,” Best said. “As we’re seeing through the ongoing ‘Arab Spring,’ these new technologies can be vital tools in service of democracy.”

In 2012, Best hopes to employ the aggregator in monitoring elections in Kenya, Senegal and the new nation of South Sudan.

“People don’t often think of themselves as being sensors, but each of us constantly senses and reacts to our environment,” said SportSense co-creator Lin Zhong, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and of computer science at Rice. “Thanks to social media sites like Twitter, it is now possible to capture those reactions — for millions of people — in real time. That’s what SportSense does.”

In collaboration with engineers from the Betaworks group at the Motorola Mobility Applied Research Center, Zhong and his students began creating software to monitor and analyze tweets in 2010.

“We chose football because touchdowns, interceptions and other events in the game cause a lot of excitement and lead a lot of people to tweet,” Zhong said. “We found that a careful examination of the tweets could tell us what was happening in the game. The program can usually tell within 20 seconds when a big play like a touchdown occurs. Often, we see that even before it appears on the scrolling banners on ESPN and other sites.”

NFL fans’ emotions and their team loyalties come through loud and clear in their tweets as well, so the software can also determine which team benefited from the big play.

For example, based on fans’ tweets, the Detroit Lions’ come-from-behind win over the Dallas Cowboys had the most excitement of all other games played last Sunday. The Detroit-Dallas game had 28 tweets a second on average for the whole game – more than nine times the total of the least-tweeted game.

The next most excitement was provided by the New York Jets-Baltimore Ravens (Sunday night football) and the San Francisco 49ers-Philadelphia Eagles games.

The least excitement was generated by the Tennessee Titans-Cleveland Browns and Miami Dolphins-San Diego Chargers games.

Recaps for all of the games can be found via www.sportsense.us.

SportSense will be analyzing games in real-time throughout the NFL season. To see it in action, visit http://sportsense.us while games are being played. Recaps of past games, including the 2010-2011 season, are also available.

When more than one game is being played, colored bars at the top of the page show how excited fans are about each game. When users click to “watch” a particular game, SportSense displays three graphs: one that shows the big plays and the overall excitement level of everyone watching the game and two others that highlight the excitement level of fans cheering for each team.

Zhong said the research team is interested in using the software to sense other things that are happening in the world.

“Anything with a sufficiently large audience has a similar potential,” he said. “Things that are televised, like reality shows and political debates, are certainly possibilities.

“We’re also interested in sensing things on a local scale. For example, when a storm hits and the power goes out in my neighborhood, I would like to know when it comes back on — even if I happen to be at work. People tweet about those types of events, so the signal is there in the data; it’s just a matter of finding it.”

According to background information in the article, alcohol is a major cause of injury and death among U.S. college students. “Approximately half of students who use alcohol report direct alcohol-related harms, and as many as 1,700 college student deaths each year are alcohol related,” write the authors. They also note that although screening tools (such as the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, or AUDIT) are available to aid in identification of persons with problem drinking, screening at the population level among college students is challenging as many do not seek health care at student centers. However, the authors write, “one novel approach to identify college students who are at risk for problem drinking may be social networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook and MySpace.”

Megan A. Moreno, M.D., M.S.Ed., M.P.H., of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and colleagues evaluated the associations between displayed alcohol use and intoxication/problem drinking (I/PD) on Facebook and self-reported problem drinking using the AUDIT clinical scale. The AUDIT is a 10-question scale that assesses consumption, dependence and harm or consequences of alcohol use. A score of eight or higher indicates the person is at risk for problem drinking. The authors included undergraduate students (ages 18-20 years) at two state universities who had public Facebook profiles in the study.

Among 307 profiles identified, 224 participants completed the survey (73 percent response rate) and were included in the study. Of the Facebook profiles coded, 64.3 percent had no alcohol references displayed on the profile (nondisplayers), 19.6 percent had references to alcohol use (alcohol displayers), and 16.1 percent displayed references to intoxication or problem drinking (I/PD displayers). A total of 216 participants completed all AUDIT questions and received a total AUDIT score. Scores ranged from zero to 26, with a mean (average) score of 5.8 and a median (midpoint) score of five. Using the standard cutoff score for at-risk problem drinking of eight or higher, 35.4 percent of participants scored into the at-risk for problem drinking category.

The authors also found that displayed alcohol references on Facebook were positively associated with being categorized as at-risk for problem drinking with 58.3 percent of I/PD displayers meeting criteria for at-risk problem drinking, compared with 37.8 percent of alcohol displayers and 22.6 percent of nondisplayers meeting this criteria. As a group, the AUDIT scores for I/PD displayers was 9.5, the score for alcohol displayers was 6.7 and for nondisplayers it was 4.7. Compared with alcohol displayers, I/PD displayers had 1.48 times higher AUDIT scores. Men who were I/PD displayers had an 89 percent higher AUDIT score than men who were nondisplayers; differences between women in each group were not statistically significant.

Additionally, the I/PD displayers were more than twice as likely as the alcohol displayers (19 percent vs. 7 percent) and more than six times as likely as nondisplayers (19 percent vs. 3 percent) to report an alcohol-related injury in the past year.

“These study findings can be used for offering evidence-based guidance recommending that students who display references to I/PD on Facebook undergo clinical screening for problem alcohol use,” the authors conclude. “Our findings suggest that targeting keywords that relate to I/PD, rather than to general keywords regarding alcohol, may provide an innovative method to deliver a tailored message to a target population.”

By tracking Twitter tweets over two-years, researchers determined that work, sleep and the amount of daylight all play a role in shaping cyclical emotions such as enthusiasm, delight, alertness, distress, fear and anger.

Researchers have long known about these affective rhythms, but have relied on small homogeneous samples and have had no practical means for hourly and long-term observation of individual behavior in large and culturally diverse populations. Before the rise of social media, these kinds of results were inconclusive, according to the researchers Scott Golder, Cornell graduate student in sociology; and Michael Macy, Cornell professor of sociology. Their paper, “Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Tracks Work, Sleep and Daylength Across Diverse Cultures,” was published in the journal Science, Sept. 29.

Using Twitter in conjunction with language monitoring software, Golder and Macy discovered two daily peaks in which tweets represented a positive attitude – relatively early in the morning and again near midnight, suggesting mood may be shaped by work-related stress. Positive tweets were also more abundant on Saturdays and Sundays, with the morning peaks occurring about two hours later in the day. This implies people awaken later on weekends.

These patterns were reflected in cultures and countries throughout the world, but shifted with the difference in time and work schedule. For example, positive tweets and late-morning mood peaks were more prominent on Fridays and Saturdays in the United Arab Emirates, where the traditional workweek is Sunday through Thursday, according to the paper.

Golder and Macy also tracked global attitude on a seasonal basis to determine if “winter blues” is represented in Twitter messages. While no correlation was discovered between absolute daylight and mood, there was a correlation when examining relative daylight, such as the gradually decreasing daylength between the summer and winter solstices.

Prof. Moshe Israelashvili of TAU’s Jaime and Joan Constantiner School of Education, with his M.A. student Taejin Kim and colleague Dr. Gabriel Bukobza, studied 278 teens, male and female, from schools throughout Israel. They found that many teens were using the Internet as a tool for exploring questions of personal identity, successfully building their own future lives using what they discover on the Web.

Prof. Israelashvili’s research, which was published in the Journal of Adolescence, encourages parents and educators to look at engagement with the online world as beneficial for teens. Social networking, he says, is a positive example of Internet use: “Facebook use is not in the same category as gambling or gaming.” As a result, Prof. Israelashvili says, researchers should redefine the characteristics of the disorder called “Internet addiction” in adolescents.

Redefining Internet addiction

The TAU researchers asked the teens to rate themselves in terms of Internet use, ego clarification, and self-understanding, and how well they related to their peer group. The researchers discovered that there was a negative correlation between Internet overuse and the teens’ levels of ego development and clarity of self-perception. Prof. Israelashvili refers to it as an indication that some Internet use is destructive and isolating while some is informative and serves a socializing function.

These results show that the current understanding of adolescent Internet addiction demands redefinition. Psychiatrists now classify an “Internet addict” as a person who spends more than 38 hours on the Internet every week. But it’s the quality, not the quantity that matters, argues Prof. Israelashvili. The researchers determined that many teens who participated in the study met the psychiatric standard of “Internet addiction,” but were actually using the Internet as a tool to aid in their journey of self-discovery.

Prof. Israelashvili says that there are two different kinds of teenage “Internet addicts.” The first group is composed of adolescents who really are addicted, misusing the Internet with things like online gaming and gambling or pornographic websites, isolating themselves from the world around them. The other group of teens can be defined as “self clarification seekers,” whose use of the Internet helps them to comprehensively define their own identities and place in the world. These teens tend to use the Internet for social networking and information gathering, such as on news sites or Twitter.

Adding in family time

Parents and educators should change the conversations they have with teens about Internet use, the researchers urge. The Internet is a big part of our modern lifestyle, and both adults and children are spending more time there. As a result, what is important is how that time is used. Students must learn to use the Internet in a healthy way — as a source of knowledge about themselves in relation to their peers around the world, recommends Prof. Israelashvili.

If parents still don’t like the amount of time their teens are spending in front of the computer, they should consider becoming an information resource for their adolescent children, encouraging a healthy flow of conversation in the household itself. “Too many parents are too preoccupied,” says Prof. Israelashvili. “They demand high academic achievements, and place less importance on teaching their children how to face the world.” Teens won’t give up the Internet, but they may spend less time online if family interactions meet some of the same needs.

By the time teens reach the age of 18 or 19, they enter a new phase of life called “emerging adulthood,” in which they take the lessons of their adolescence and implement them to build a more independent life. If they have spent their teenage years worrying only about their academic performance or gaming, they won’t be able to manage well during their emerging adulthood and might have difficulties in making personal decisions and relate well to the world around them, Prof. Israelashvili concludes.