Study Finds Facebook Isn't The Best Place For People With Low Self-Esteem

And the average Facebook user doesn't like people who just update their status with complaint after complaint.

A study published in Psychological Science has found that Facebook isn't the best place for people with already low self-esteem to make friends.

While sharing is an important part of friendship, constantly sending out negative messages to those friends, via status update, is not. Unfortunately, the study has found that is exactly what people with low self-esteem do.

After asking students at the University of Waterloo how they felt about the online social network, those with lower self-esteem were more likely to appreciate the service as a safe place to connect with people without the risk of awkward social situations.

You know, like saying something awkward that shouldn't have been said and then having to face the awkward silence that follows? Not so great in real life, but (in case you haven't noticed) people do it on Facebook all the time without a care in the world.

Researchers studied what kind of information went into the generally negative status updates from users lacking in the self-esteem department. The study then had a coder — a scientific term for complete stranger — read the positive or negative updates and then share their opinion of the person writing them.

Surprise, surprise! People writing things like "[Name] is upset b/c her phone got stolen :@" were generally not favored compared to those writing positive messages for their friends to read.

Here's our advice to anybody trying to make friends through Mark Zuckerberg's billion dollar invention: quit complaining and take the time to share something worth reading every once in a while.

If you DON'T care about making friends, then by all means, continue depressing us on a daily basis by posting status updates about everything going wrong in your life and we'll just keep unfriending you.

Tags: facebook, friendship, mark zuckerberg, messages, psychological science, self-esteem, social network, status update, university of waterloo