Social Network : Study: Facebook Causes Stress, Anxiety, But Keeps Us Hooked, Anyway

Some Facebook users may enjoy collecting hundreds of virtual friends, but it turns out that those online relationships can cause a lot of stress, as well.

That's what researchers at Edinburgh Napier University discovered after conducting a survey of 200 students who regularly use the social networking site. Among the students who were surveyed, 12-percent said they actually dislike receiving friend requests, while 63-percent said they often delay responding to requests. More than one out of every 10 users said that the site made them anxious, and about three out of ten claimed to feel guilty about rejecting friend requests. Others said they felt pressure to come up with inventive status updates, and didn't enjoy having to apply different rules of online etiquette to different friends.

But, if Facebook causes so much stress, why do so many people use it? According to lead researcher Dr. Kathy Charles, the "overwhelming majority" of students said they rely on the site to keep in touch with their friends, and many said they won't delete their accounts because they don't want to miss out on something important or offend others.

This pressure, Charles says, keeps Facebook users in a constant state of "neurotic limbo, not knowing whether they should hang on in there just in case they miss out on something good." Many of the students surveyed, however, weren't all that enthusiastic about the real or perceived benefits that the site offers. "[A]lthough there is great pressure to be on Facebook there is also considerable ambivalence amongst users about its benefits," Charles explained. "And we found it was actually those with the most contacts, those who had invested the most time in the site, who were the ones most likely to be stressed."

Charles speculated that many users may feel anxious because of the site's intrinsically self-centered structure. "It's like being a mini news channel about yourself. The more people you have the more you feel there is an audience there," Charles told the BBC. "You are almost a mini celebrity and the bigger the audience the more pressure you feel to produce something about yourself."