Heena Sharma Blog

If you often share details of your personal life on social media , include your better half in the post to counter its negative effects on your romantic relationship , a study suggests. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Kansas (KU) in the US also found that sharing information online can do more harm to romantic relationships than good. The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, is the first of its kind to systematically examine how different circumstances can affect whether a partner perceives their loved one's online disclosure to be positive or negative. "Prior research has shown that self-disclosure positively affects offline relationships," said Juwon Lee, a post-doctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. "We wanted to explore whether that would remain the case in an online context, where users can share detailed information with large audiences -- a phenomenon that typically would not be possible in person,...

Excessive use of social media platforms like Facebook can make its users take decisions as bad as drug addicts tend to do, a new study suggests. "Around one-third of humans on the planet are using social media, and some of these people are displaying maladaptive, excessive use of these sites," said lead author of the study Dar Meshi, Assistant Professor at Michigan State University in the US. "I believe that social media has tremendous benefits for individuals, but there's also a dark side when people can't pull themselves away. We need to better understand this drive so we can determine if excessive social media use should be considered an addiction," Meshi added. For the study, published in the Journal of Behavior Addictions, the researchers had 71 participants take a survey that measured their psychological dependence on Facebook, similar to addiction. Questions on the survey asked about users' preoccupation with the platform, thei...