Does spending all your time on social networks make you lonely?
That's what a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona hoped to find out when he organized a study on how a person's volume of Facebook use effects his or her perception of connection to friends, family and the rest of the world.
Matthias Mehl and his team performed the study with a group of 100 participants who were separated into two groups, he told HuffPost Live's Ricky Camilleri. One of them was randomly assigned to post more frequent Facebook updates than normal for one week, while the control group used the site as they typically would. The researchers then used a scale and questionnaire developed at UCLA to measure how the activity affected the subjects' level of loneliness.
The result? It turns out people who use Facebook more often actually feel more closely connected to their real lives.
"We did find that the people who [updated Facebook more often] decreased in loneliness over time relative to the control group," Mehl said. "This effect was driven by, was carried by a daily sense of being socially connected."
Catch the full conversation about loneliness and social networks at HuffPost Live HERE.
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