Does misery love company on Facebook? A recent study investigated the question:
The researchers created three distinct Facebook profiles of a fictitious person named Sara Thomas who had just experienced a break-up.
The three profiles were identical in all respects except for how much information was conveyed about the recent (fictitious) break-up. In their article, [researcher Andrew] High and colleagues use the expression “emotional bandwidth” to describe the extent of emotions conveyed in the Facebook profile.
In the low bandwidth scenario, the profile contained the following status update: “sad and depressed :(“. The medium bandwidth profile included a change in relationship status to “single” in the timeline, in addition to the low bandwidth profile update “sad and depressed :(“. Finally, the high emotional bandwidth profile not only contained the updates of the low and medium bandwidth profiles, but also included a picture of a crying woman (the other two profiles had no photo, just the standard Facebook shadow image). …
High and colleagues hypothesized that the high emotional bandwidth profiles would elicit greater support from the students. … To their surprise, the researchers found the opposite. The willingness to provide emotional or network support was significantly lower among students who viewed the high emotional bandwidth profile! For example, average emotional support scores were 7.8 among students who saw Sara entering the “sad and depressed:(” update (low bandwidth) but the scores were only 6.5 among students who also saw the image of Sara crying and updating her relationship status to single (high bandwidth). Interestingly, students who preferred online interactions over face-to-face interactions or those who felt that Facebook created a strong sense of community responded positively to the high bandwidth profile.
The Dish 