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Facebook: Is this any place for the not-so-self-assured to make friends?
Los Angeles Times: Facebook, the social networking giant that connects 845 million people to one another, may be a jolly gabfest for the self-assured. But for those who suffer from low self-esteem, it appears to be a rather nasty trap, luring such people into self-disclosures that prompt many a Facebook friend to agree with their low opinion of themselves.
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A Postwar Picture of Resilience
The New York Times: WHEN the United States announced last week that its combat troops in Afghanistan would be withdrawn by mid-2013, there was obvious relief. But it was followed by familiar concerns. One of the biggest of those concerns is the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder among the tens of thousands of returning veterans, which according to some media reports runs as high as 35 percent. These reports have incited fears that we will soon face a PTSD epidemic. But are such fears justified? According to mounting scientific evidence, they are not. In fact, the prevalence of PTSD among veterans of recent wars is about 10 percent — substantially lower than is commonly believed.
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Negative Nancy? Your Facebook friends might hate you for it: Study
Toronto Sun: Stop complaining on Facebook. Your "friends" are starting to hate you for it, a study from Ontario's University of Waterloo suggests. "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 to be published in the journal Psychological Science. Co-writers Amanda Forest and Joanne Wood took the last 10 status updates of students and had people rate how positive or negative they are. Participants then rated how much they liked the person who wrote them.
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Traumatic experience, silence linked
Yahoo! India: People who suffer a traumatic experience often don't talk about it, and many forget it over time. "There's this idea, with silence, that if we don't talk about something, it starts fading," says Charles B. Stone of Belgium's Universite Catholique de Louvain, the co-author of a study on the subject. But that belief isn't necessarily backed up by psychological research-a lot of it comes from a Freudian belief that everyone has deep-seated issues we're repressing and ought to talk about, the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science reports. The real relationship between silence and memory is much more complicated, Stone says, according to a university statement.
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Grading The Online Dating Industry
New Scientific Report Finds Some Positives, Many Areas for Improvement The report card is in, and the online dating industry won't be putting this one on the fridge. A new scientific report concludes that although online dating offers users some very real benefits, it falls far short of its potential. Unheard of just twenty years ago, online dating is now a billion dollar industry and one of the most common ways for singles to meet potential partners. Many websites claim that they can help you find your “soulmate.” But do these online dating services live up to all the hype?
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Psicologia: Facebook insidia per chi ha scarsa autostima
Yahoo Italia: Facebook è per molti, ma non per tutti. Il social network dei record, infatti, è controindicato per le persone con scarsa autostima. Secondo uno studio pubblicato su 'Psychological Science', infatti, questo tipo di cybernauti finisce per bombardare gli amici online con messaggi negativi sulla propria vita, rendendosi sgradevole senza rendersene conto. "Pensavamo che Facebook potesse essere un posto fantastico per le persone, uno spazio per rafforzare le relazioni", spiega Amanda Forest dell'University of Waterloo, coautrice della ricerca insieme a Joanne Woo. Anche perché "chi soffre di scarsa autostima spesso è a disagio nelle relazioni faccia a faccia", spiega.
