According to research from 2015, emotional health decreases while engaging in passive Facebook use, but increases when hanging out with friends in real life.

In an 2015 study titled “Passive Facebook Usage Undermines Affective Well-Being: Experimental and Longitudinal Evidence,” researchers at the University of Leuven and the University of Michigan presented results from two experiments on how Facebook affects young adults’ feelings.

They defined two ways of Facebooking—active and passive. Active Facebook usage involves “activities that facilitate direct exchanges with others (e.g., posting status updates and commenting on posts)” and passive Facebook usage is defined as “consuming information without direct exchanges (e.g., scrolling through news feeds, viewing posts).”

In one experiment, volunteers either passively or actively used Facebook in a lab setting.

In the second experiment, volunteers outside the lab responded to a survey asking about emotional “well-being, envy, active Facebook usage, passive Facebook usage, direct social interaction and non-Facebook online social network usage” a handful of times for just under a week.

The researchers determined that “people felt 5% worse when they engaged passive Facebook usage ‘a lot’… compared to when they did not use Facebook passively at all.” They also concluded “passive (but not active) Facebook usage specifically undermines affective [emotional] well-being and does so by enhancing envy.”  

Despite these findings, decreased contentment with life was not forecast by either type of Facebook usage. However, they said that “direct social interaction predicted increases in affective [emotional] well-being over time.”

“I would say that the negative aspects of Facebook outweigh the positive aspects, with a tendency to give me a negative outlook on life. The elaborate posts can make the user feel as if his or her life is just mediocre in comparison,”said Calvin junior Breanna Kooiman.

“It’s important to remember that your news feed is essentially a highlight reel of your friends’ lives, and whenever you’re looking at it, you’re probably not having one of your own, said Jacob Bruinius, a Calvin senior.