Know： How happy are you when you are ＂liked＂？

　　On the social networking platform, do everyone expect to like, reply and forward? How happy are you when you are "liked"? Everyone may have a similar "conclusion" in their hearts, but now this question has a clearer answer.

　　Recently, American psychologists made an interesting study.

　　Researchers from the Amanson-lovelace Brain Map Center at UCLA selected 32 teenagers aged 13 to 18 to join a simulated social network similar to Instagram, a photo-sharing website. The researcher showed 148 pictures to the subjects in 12 minutes, including 40 pictures submitted by teenagers themselves.

　　Each picture is supposed to get some "likes" from other teenagers, but this is actually what the researchers did. Psychologists sit behind the functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and observe the brain activity of the subjects when they see the pictures.

　　Lauren Sherman, the main author of the paper, said that when the photos submitted by teenagers receive a lot of "likes", many specific areas in their brains will be activated, which is very similar to the brain activity when people eat chocolate or win money.

　　In short, the pleasure of "like" is similar to eating chocolate or winning money.

　　What are the influences on "like" behavior?

　　"Like" is influenced by "herd mentality". Sherman said that photos that have gained more "likes" are more likely to be "liked" by teenagers, which means that teenagers’ feedback on information depends on how many peers have recognized the information, even though the peers in the experiment may be strangers. In real life, this "peer influence" may be further amplified, because it will be people familiar with them.

　　"Like" is also influenced by behavior, attitude and preference. For example, volunteers with high openness tend to praise SalvadorDali, meditation or TED talks; Volunteers with high extroversion tend to praise parties, Snookie (reality TV star) or dances.

　　Are social media good or bad for teenagers?

　　Mirella Dapretto, a professor of biological behavior at UCLA, said that making friends with unfamiliar people on social networks may make teenagers more susceptible to dangerous people.

　　However, Sherman believes that teenagers are also influenced by positive behaviors on social media, so parents need to pay attention to who their children interact with on social networks and what their netizens post and "like".

　　Coincidentally, many years ago, LevMuchnik of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his colleagues formed a research team with a news aggregation website to investigate the social impact caused by different network information.

　　The results show that positive social impacts tend to accumulate and often lead to herd effect, while negative social impacts are usually corrected by the masses and neutralized. This effect is particularly significant when it comes to specific topics such as politics, culture and business.

　　Are you "social image anxiety"?

　　"After sending a selfie, I will pay attention to how many people like it. After sending the voice, I will open it myself and listen to it again. Once I create an ice, I will be very sad. I am afraid that no one will respond and dare not speak in the group. I think that my sense of existence is weak."

　　However, from a professional point of view, the so-called "social image anxiety" is just exaggerated teasing, not mental illness. It is not shameful to expect praise, reply and forwarding on social networking platforms, and the slight anxiety caused by the expectation of failure is not a "disease". The desire to "come and pay attention to me" permeated in these actions is nothing more than the most basic needs of human beings in the eyes of humanistic psychologist Maslow.

　　It is perfectly normal to need the attention of others. Babies who can’t get the mother’s attention can’t survive; Children living in indifferent families have depression and aggressive behavior; Teenagers who can’t get the attention and recognition of their peers feel no difference between the pain of social rejection and physical pain; Adults with good interpersonal relationships will live longer. No wonder William? James wrote in "Principles of Psychology": "If it is feasible, the cruelest punishment for a person is this: give him freedom and let him roam in the society, but treat it as nothing and give him no attention at all."

　　The "symptoms" mentioned above are not so much manifestations of anxiety as normal behaviors caused by low self-esteem. Different from the "self-esteem" mentioned in people’s life, in psychology, self-esteem refers to a person’s attitude towards himself and his value judgment-people with high self-esteem have a clearer understanding of themselves and a more pertinent evaluation; However, people with low self-esteem have unstable and more negative understanding of themselves, and there are more problems in interpersonal communication.

　　The pressure of "asking for praise" in the circle of friends may make you a friend.

　　In a study on Facebook conducted in 2013, psychologists sent text messages to 82 people five times a day, asking them how long they used Facebook and how they felt. The researchers said: "We found that the more people reported their Facebook at a certain moment, the more their mood (reported by the subjects themselves) deteriorated from the beginning to the end of this period."

　　Why is this happening? Psychologists have found that for some participants, brushing Facebook is not pleasant; It haunts me like a long list of commands: inspire me, comfort me, wish me a happy birthday, invest money in my crowdfunding project, praise my new avatar and read my new feature on Nautilus. Social networking sites bombard users with various requests in an unprecedented way. These requests are not made in a one-to-one manner; They are like shotguns, one to many. No wonder people are under pressure.

　　PS: The above-mentioned point-to-point praise of madness may not be applicable …