This is how social media likes affect your brain

An investigation conducted by UCLA and published in Psychological Science has concluded that seeing how the photographs published on a social network are appreciated by other people via the "like" button activates them brain areas that are activated with the masturbation or the fact of savoring very sweet foods such as chocolate.

The Psychology behind Instagram and Facebook likes

This study confirms the intuition that many people had: that the operation of certain social networks is designed so that they are true gyms of the narcissism.

However, its implications go much further. Let's see how the research was done.

How was the study done?

This research, carried out by the psychologist Lauren Sherman and her team was based on the use of an imitation of the social network Instagram. Sherman and his researchers recruited 32 teenagers (14 boys and 18 girls) accustomed to using Instagram and, using MRI, saw how their brain It was activated while the young people interacted with the imitation of that social network in which they could see both the images that they had uploaded and the photos of people unknown.

Each of the participants in this experiment were informed that they were going to use a network social media used by a small community while taking fMRI images of their activity neuronal. However, the truth is that the photographs of unknown people seemed to belong to the accounts of young people, they had been selected by the research team and, in fact, these scientists were also in charge of putting a certain amount of likes on all the images.

Thus, each teenager had the opportunity to react to 40 of the photos from her own real Instagram account and 108 from strangers. In addition, the researchers informed the participants that each of the photographs they were going to see had been seen, valued and potentially "liked" by about fifty young people, something that was not really certain.

The effects that Instagram has on the human brain

By checking MRI images of different brains, Sherman and her companions saw that a brain structure called nucleus accumbens It was activated more the more likes an image had. This is very relevant, considering that the nucleus accumbens is responsible for us to experience moments of intense pleasure by winning an award, having an orgasm, drink a smoothie, etc.

This area of ​​the brain is responsible for detecting the peak moments of pleasure and thus has a role in the appearance of addictions and in the reward mechanisms responsible for us to try to create the situations so that these "happiness peaks" are repeated as often as possible.

The influence of others seeps into digital

But this research also yielded another surprising conclusion: social media can make teens more inclined to do reckless acts, something that also happens when they are physically accompanied by other people of the same age.

In the young men and women who participated in the research, brain regions related to self control and the following of standards were relatively off when they saw images related to risky behaviors, such as skateboarding through dangerous terrain or driving taking photos... although they did not know the people to whom the photographs supposedly belonged. This effect was intensified if these photographs had a large number of likes..

To this effect we must add the one we have seen before. Likes activate small pleasure structures in the brain, which can cause not only the images themselves are associated with well-being, but also the activities that can be seen in they.

Is there a reason for the alarms to go off?

The idea that participating in a social network such as Instagram can induce young people to pursue risk is still a hypothesis that has yet to be tested. Ultimately, what has been seen in this research are only images of brain regions activated or deactivated, and has not been experienced in real settings where young people might attempt recklessness.

However, these results give reasons to continue investigating in this line, even if it is so that we have the opportunity to know how to educate and educate ourselves in the use of social networks.