Ten Findings About Facebook for its 10th Birthday

Happy Birthday, Facebook!

Over the past ten years, Facebook has added a new dimension to the social lives of over a billion people. Given its popularity, it has become the topic of a growing body of research in the social sciences. For Facebook’s 10th birthday, I collected ten discoveries this research has yielded and share brief summaries below. If you’re on Facebook, then this research applies to you! Happy birthday, Facebook!

1. Does Facebook help us feel better by fulfilling our need for social connection? The authors of one study text-messaged people five times per day for two weeks and asked people about their Facebook use and their well-being. The more people used Facebook at one time, the worse they felt the next time they were text-messaged. In addition, over the two weeks of the study, the more people used Facebook, the more their life satisfaction decreased.

PYM's Graduate Student Guide-Blog

In thinking about the past three years writing for PYM, I just realized that I write a lot of posts about issues that graduate students care about. I've made a list with links to each of these posts below. Now all the "wisdom" I have to offer about graduate school is in one place. I hope this will help you--current and future graduate students in psychology--to navigate the challenges and opportunities that many of us face on our way to a PhD! Good luck in your journey and don't be afraid to leave comments or questions on the post or on twitter (@mwkraus or @psychyourmind).

Pro Tip: Treat Graduate School Like a Job

source

I really enjoyed graduate school. I attended UC Berkeley's social-personality psychology PhD program from 2004-2010 and the whole time I felt like a kid in a candy store. Sometimes my typical day included reading a book while lounging outside in the sun on Berkeley's memorial glade. Other days I would spend several hours in a local coffee shop (the ORIGINAL PEET'S!!!!) writing a manuscript describing a study providing knowledge that no-one before me had produced. On still other days I would play pick-up basketball with a hilarious combination of former college basketball players and current Berkeley psychology professors. It's a time in my life that I will always look back on fondly.

Of course I did also get a little bit of work done while I was in graduate school. I collected data obsessively, I wrote for 20-30 hours each week, I coded nonverbal behavior four hours a day for two