CorpComms Magazine

The more Facebook friends you have, the more likely you are to feel stressed out about keeping them updated on news, according to a new study of students by psychologists from Edinburgh Napier University.

More than one in ten of respondents, who each had an average of 117 friends on Facebook, said the social networking site made them anxious, while 63 per cent delayed replying to friend requests.

One in three said that rejecting friend requests made them feel guilty, while 10 per cent admitted that they disliked receiving friend requests.

Study leader Kathy Charles admitted the results 'threw up a number of paradoxes'.

She added: 'Although there is great pressure to be on Facebook, there is also considerable ambivalence amongst users about its benefits. Our data also suggests that there is a significant minority of users who experience considerable Facebook-related anxiety, with only very modest or tenuous rewards.'

While the majority of those students surveyed said the best thing about Facebook was keeping in touch, many fretted about the pressure of being inventive and entertaining or the problems related to purging unwanted contacts.

'But many also told us that they were anxious about withdrawing from the site for fear of missing important social information or offending contacts,' said Charles.

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