“They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am”: The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others' Lives

By Hui-Tzu Grace Chou, Nicholas Edge. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 2012

1,096 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Communication, Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ec2a88e39453b50ada493a79371b03be15a5299

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Citations in the corpus

Explaining Females’ Envy Toward Social Media Influencers (2018, background): “For example, studies have reported a positive association between Facebook use and envy (Chou & Edge, 2012) and also shown that envy mediates the relationship between social media use and life satisfaction or depression (Krasnova et al., 2013; Tandoc et al., 2015; Verduyn et al., 2015).”
Impact of Social Media on Self-Esteem (2017, background): “Chou and Edge (2012) concluded that people who use facebook frequently have a very firm belief that other users, who they don’t know very well offline, are living a very healthy, happy and prosperous life than themselves.”
Passive Facebook usage undermines affective well-being: Experimental and longitudinal evidence. (2015, neutral): “Although some cross-sectional evidence supports this idea (Chou & Edge, 2012; Krasnova et al., 2013), experimental and longitudinal evidence is needed to demonstrate whether it is true.”
Social Network Sites and Well-Being: The Role of Social Connection (2018, background): “For example, those who spend more time on Facebook and those who have more strangers as Facebook friends are more likely to feel that others have better lives than they do (Chou & Edge, 2012).”
Fear of Missing Out, online social networking and mobile phone addiction: A latent profile approach (2017, background): “The easier the access to this type of information, the higher the possibility for users to compare their lives with those of others, sometimes coming to believe that these others are better off than themselves (Chou & Edge, 2012).”
Personality, fear of missing out and problematic internet use and their relationship to subjective well-being (2017, background): “Thus, people see positive emotional content online and believe their friends to be happier, more successful, and more emotionally positive compared to themselves (Chou & Edge, 2012).”
The Selfie Generation: Examining the Relationship Between Social Media Use and Early Adolescent Body Image (2019, result): “This upward social comparison is not limited to appearance, and one study found that the longer individuals had used Facebook, the more they felt that other people were happier than them and that life overall was unfair (Chou & Edge, 2012).”
Exploring the Relationships Between Different Types of Facebook Use, Perceived Online Social Support, and Adolescents’ Depressed Mood (2016, background): “…disclosing especially positive emotional experiences, as well as presenting a better impression of their emotional well-being (Qiu, Lin, Leung, & Tov, 2012), people may get the feeling that others are happier than they are, which may lead to unpleasant feelings (e.g., Chou & Edge, 2012; Lee, 2014).”
Negative Social Comparison on Facebook and Depressive Symptoms: Rumination as a Mechanism (2013, background): “Chou and Edge (2012) also found that individuals who spent more time on Facebook were more likely to agree that others were “happier” and “had better lives.””
Social Network Sites, Individual Social Capital and Happiness (2016, background): “In particular, people who lack individual social capital are more prone to experiencing feelings of envy and jealousy because they already feel a lack of connectedness or communality and tend to attribute the positive content presented on a given SNS page to the owner’s personality rather than to si”
Attachment theory as a framework for explaining engagement with Facebook (2015, background): “…fulfill self-presentational, self-esteem, or relational needs exposes people to the possibility of experiencing chronic upward social comparison, as they invariably witness others’ selfpromoting, attention-seeking behaviors and successful garnering of positive social feedback (Chou & Edge, 2012).”
Passive social network site use and subjective well-being among Chinese university students: A moderated mediation model of envy and gender (2017, background): “However, individuals who passively use SNS tend to have greater exposure to others' positive self-presentation, and in a process of social comparison they often feel that others live more happily than themselves (Chou & Edge, 2012).”