People respond to Facebook logos faster than street signs

Today a lot of people, including adolesents suffer social sites addiction. It turns out, "Facebook addiction" may show up in the brain. A new study found that the brains of people who report compulsive urges to use the social networking site show some brain patterns similar to those found in drug addicts. However, this parallel isn't perfect: Compulsive Facebook users may have more activity in impulsive systems in the brain, but the brain regions that inhibit this behavior seem to work just fine, unlike in the brains of cocaine addicts.

Facebook addicts are sensitized to respond strongly to positive triggers associated with the site, said study co-author Ofir Turel, a psychologist at California State University, Fullerton. "They have the ability to control their behavior, but they don't have the motivation to control this behavior because they don't see the consequences to be that severe."

To understand how this process affects the brain, Turel and his colleagues asked 20 undergraduate students to fill out a questionnaire that gauged addiction-type symptoms associated with Facebook use, such as withdrawal, anxiety and conflict over the site.

The researchers then used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the participants' brains while they looked at a series of computer images — some Facebook logos, and others of neutral traffic signs. The students were told to either press or not press a button in response to each image.

It turned out that Facebook addicted participants were faster in hitting the button when viewing Facebook images compared to neutral images. Similarly, the participants were more likely to mistakenly press the button when they saw a Facebook logo versus a neutral traffic sign. Essentially, the Facebook cues were much more potent triggers in people's brains than the traffic signs.

That means that, while driving, people are going to respond faster to beeps from their cellphone than to street signs.

It should be noted that several studies have suggested that Facebook and other social networking sites have a profound impact on people. For example, Facebook can cause failed relations and depression.

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