Depression and facebook use among university students

Abstract

In the following process of their rose, uses of social networks have rapidly increased. These networks have impact on many fields. One of the fields of that which exposed to impact is individual’s psychology. Social networks affects user’s psychology and it occurs in various forms. According to the social experiment which applied by Sagioglu and Greitemeyer, long term use of Facebook causes depression, loneliness and jealousy. Moreover in a research which carried out in Missouri University has illustrated that witnessing another one’s life and comparing own life with other’s in Facebook by users causes jealousy at first then depression. Social comparisons – comparisons between the self and others – are a fundamental psychological mechanism influencing people’s judgements, experiments and behavior. This theory proposed by Leon Festinger and explains how individuals evaluate their own opinions and abilities by comparing themselves to others. This study examined whether the use of Facebook – one of the most common social network- is related to depressive moods among university students. Social comparison theory will be used to explain the psychological processes that cause people to feel depressed