Emotional Responses During Social Information Seeking on Facebook

    A research conducted by Kevin Wise, Ph. D., Saleen Alhabash, M.A., and Hyojung Park, M.A. was based on existing research on social networking and information seeking. Facebook is a social networking website defined by its creators as "a social social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers." It's popularity is worldwide with over 350 million active users. Facebook use could be conceptualized as serving two primary goals: passive social browsing and extractive social searching. This study explored if these categories adequately reflect facebok use and wheter they moderate physiological responses associated with motivation and emotion were recorded. Results showed that the majority of screens encountered during Facebook use could be categorized as devoted to social browsing or social searching. Participants spent more time on social browsing than  they spent on social searching. Facial EMG data indicated that participants experienced more pleasantness during the course of social searching than they experienced during social browsing.
     Recent research on Facebook can be divided into three areas: its uses and gratifications at both intrapersonal and interpersonal levels, its sociopolitical and psychosocial influences and the privacy implcations of its form and function. This research builds on these exploring the uses and gratifications of Facebook use. For this research, thirty six undergraduates were recruited from an introductory advertising class at a large Midwestern University. Participants spent 5 minutes on each of the three test websites: Amazon.com, CNN.com and Facebook.com. The order of the websites were randomized and participants were instructed to navigate each website as they normally would and to not go outside the particular website during the 5 minute period. For the results, the screens were coded according to their indications of social browsing, social searching, communication, and impression management. Social browsing screens were the screens which include, the participants' main page (news feed) or pages with a list of the participants' friends, friends photo albums, Facebook group list, and events. Basically social-browsing screens had information about different friends of the participant. Social searching screens were categorized as visiting pages related to a specific friend of the participant, such as visiting a friends page, reading their wall, etc.
      Researchers measured emotional responses, skin conductance and facial EMG while participants viewed and browsed Facebook. This study provided a peliminary conceptualization of how users' spen their time on Facebook and how different uses of Facbeook affect psychological responses associated with emotion. Social browsing is categorized as passive social information-seeking and social searching as an extractive social information- seeking. Video data of participants behavior while browsing Facebook, showed that participants devoted most of their time to social browsing or social searching and communication. Participants spent more time overall and per page on pages that were defined as social searching pages, than they spent on pages defined as social browsing pages.