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Key points
- In three experiments, over 3,000 college students reported on their mood and social interactions several times a day.
- Participants reported greater wellbeing when they were socializing than when they were not.
- In-person social interactions provided the biggest mood boost, but computer-mediated interactions were still more enjoyable than not socializing.
Humans are social beings, and it is well-established that strong relationships are good for us. Many studies show that we feel better when we're socializing than when we're alone. But some have argued that digital interactions, with their lack of social cues, such as facial expressions and vocal information, are less satisfying than their offline counterparts. Some studies have shown that screen time is associated with poorer wellbeing; although findings have been mixed.
One of the difficulties in understanding how different forms of socializing affect wellbeing is that many studies compare different people with different socialization habits. So it's not clear if the socializing habits are contributing to people's wellbeing, or if wellbeing itself is actually influencing people's social habits. So, most research on this topic doesn't tell us much about how individual people's digital interactions affect their wellbeing in the moment. These studies also tend not to compare digital interactions to their face-to-face counterparts. Is digital socializing a suitable replacement for face-to-face interactions, conferring the same benefits? Is digital socializing harmful, making us feel worse than simply spending time without social interaction?
A new paper by Lara Kroencke and colleagues just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sought to answer these questions using data from three large-scale studies of undergraduate students, following their social activity over time. Following people's activity over time allows researchers to determine how good people feel in a variety of situations. We can look at the same person and compare their typical mood when they're interacting in person, online, via text, or spending time without socializing.
The Researchers' Method
Kroencke and her colleagues examined data from three studies involving over 3,000 undergraduate students who contributed over 139,000 reports of their social activity and mood. Participants completed daily surveys 5 to 7 times a day for a period up to a month long. Throughout the day, participants received email notifications telling them to complete an online survey in which they reported on their activity in the 15 or 60 minutes prior to receiving the notification (the length of time differed between the studies). Participants answered questions about their mood and any social interactions they had during the brief period immediately preceding the survey.
Importantly, the participants indicated the mode of communication for any social interaction they reported: face-to-face, and various distant communication methods, including talking on the phone, texting, email, or social media interactions, checking off all that applied to the time period in question. The researchers then classified responses into three categories: face-to-face, computer-mediated (any combination of the other responses), and mixed (a combination of face-to-face and other modes). Participants reported not socializing in just over a third of the reported time periods.
For those periods in which they did report socializing, 43% of these interactions were face-to-face, 31% computer-mediated, and 27% mixed. The majority of the computer-mediated interactions involved texting (e.g., chatting on an app or text message), with social media interactions being the second most common, and phone or video chatting being the least common.
The Results
Across all three studies, participants experienced better wellbeing after they interacted in person or engaged in mixed interactions (mix of in-person and computer-mediated socializing during the same time period), compared to time periods when they weren't socializing at all. But how did completely computer-mediated interactions fare? People generally reported feeling better interacting in person than at a distance. But even those computer-mediated interactions were related to better wellbeing than not socializing at all. This shows that while face-to-face socializing is likely to give us the biggest mood boost, socializing at a distance is still better than nothing.
The researchers also compared people who generally engaged in high levels of social interactions with those who were less social. They found that people who reported more face-to-face social interactions were happier than those with fewer such interactions. However, the amount of computer-mediated socializing people engaged in was not related to wellbeing. This suggests that people who have richer in-person social lives are likely to be better adjusted overall.
The study also examined how personality related to the effects of communication on wellbeing. Surprisingly, the effects of social interaction on wellbeing were not related to the participants’ levels of agreeableness (the tendency to get along well with and cooperate with others), extraversion, conscientiousness (the tendency to be organized and reliable), or openness (the tendency to be open to new experiences). That is, the average effect of these communication modes was the same for people with different personalities.
The one exception to this was neuroticism – the tendency to be anxious and emotionally unstable. People high in neuroticism actually benefitted more from social interactions than people who were low on the trait. This surprised the researchers who had expected that emotionally unstable individuals would benefit less due to their tendency to experience negative emotions when interacting with others. They speculated that this tendency for anxious people to benefit more from social interaction might be due to their tendency to need, and thus seek out, social support from others.
Conclusion
It is important to remember that these results are general patterns that emerged over many people having many different kinds of social experiences. The researchers grouped together multiple types of computer-mediated socializing and weren't able to examine the many nuances of each individual social situation that participants described. Nonetheless, these results suggest that socializing in any form – whether it's in person, over the phone, texting, or via social media – is likely to improve our mood. However, not all communication modes are created equal. We get the biggest boost from old-fashioned face-to-face socializing, and that boost seems to be the same whether or not we mix it with digital interactions.
