Read a little. Learn a lot. • Tightly-written news, views and stuff • Follow us on TwitterBe a Facebook FanTumble us!

13 Feb 2012 15:26

tags

Culture: Having too many Facebook friends can make you depressed

  • 354Facebook friends ought to be your limit source
  • » There’s nothing wrong with denying that friend request: A recent study presented at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology meeting asked a group of participants to check their friend’s status updates. After doing so, they rated their lives as “much less satisfying” than a group that didn’t check their news feed. They looked at how many friends the users had, and found that 354 friends was roughly the point at which reading status updates started making them sad. The theory is that status updates often paint a disproportionately positive picture of peoples’ lives. Readers of said updates compare their own lives to those represented in status updates, and figure that they’re having a lot less fun than everybody else. The solution, then, is to either clean up your friends list, or befriend a bunch of depressed misanthropes.

23 Dec 2011 08:59

tags

Tech: Scientists used math on Twitter to tell us we’re sad… which makes us even sadder.

  • Happiness is trending downward. Great.  After studying the Twitter accounts of 63 million users for 33 months, science tells us that we’re not using as many happiness keywords. Users seem to reach their peak happiness on and around holidays and the weekends; happiness “plummets” on Mondays and Tuesdays. All in all, people shouldn’t be using Twitter as their go-to source of human emotions; do they even count Sockington?  source

06 Jan 2011 17:03

tags

Offbeat: Happiness is a dancer: Crazy dancer turns seizure into dance

  • Does Susan Boyle have a sister? And does she like to dance? Because this woman … her moves are something else. Best part? Her name is Happiness. (Thanks Adam Griffiths) source