Teens With Too Many Facebook Friends Linked To Higher Stress Levels

The participants each answered a questionnaire detailing their Facebook activities.

“However, our results show that while consumers of certain types of self-help books secrete higher levels of cortisol (a stress hormone) when confronted with stressful situations, consumers of another type of self-help books show higher depressive symptomatology compared to non-consumers”, she said.

Researchers claimed avid users of social media had increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol. But researchers at the University of Montreal recently found that the social network may play a role in negatively affecting teens when it comes to their stress levels. But Facebook is not all bad news and stress for teenagers, as the team has also found that there is a decrease in cortisol levels for teenagers that experience a positive and encouraging behavior from their friends when using the social media site, when their friends offer their support in the form of likes or encouraging comments.

‘We were able to show that beyond 300 Facebook friends, adolescents showed higher cortisol levels; we can therefore imagine that those who have 1,000 or 2,000 friends on Facebook may be subjected to even greater stress’.

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“Initially, we thought we had observed a difference in participants in terms of personality, sense of control, and self-esteem based on their self-help reading habits”, said first author Catherine Raymond, a doctoral student at the Institut universitaire en sante mentale de Montreal. But despite an assorted number of determinants, Facebook tops the list and is responsible for 8% of the exaggerated cortisol level.

For a period of three days during the study, the researchers also collected cortisol samples from the 88 teens involved in the study.

The effects of extended Facebook usage have been studied in previous studies as well and although Lupien’s research did not investigate the teenager’s risk of developing depression, other recent studies have shown that a few negative effects may exist from using the social media page.

While outside the scope of this study, it’s well documented that elevated cortisol levels can be unsafe over time. Lupien and team’s findings were released in the Psychoneuroendocrinology journal, the official journal of the global Society of Psychoneuroendocrinology.