Staring at your Facebook profile boosts self-esteem, kills motivation

On Facebook, we create idealized versions of ourselves. We carefully write each status update and post only the most flattering of photos.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, have discovered that when we stare at our own profiles, then, we're boosting our own self-esteem.

"Most have a very large audience of friends and they selectively present the best version of self, but they do so in an accurate manner," Catalina Toma, an assistant professor of communication arts at University of Wisconsin-Madison who led the study, tells ABC News. "We had people look at their own profiles for five minutes and found that they experienced a boost in self-esteem in a deep, unconscious level."

But that boost in self-esteem doesn't come without a downside -- it left study subjects with little motivation to perform well in a follow-up task.

Toma's work is published in the June issue of Media Psychology.

Also see: Why more teens are 'unfriending' Facebook and turning to Twitter

In the study, the researchers assessed participants' self-esteem using the Implicit Association Test in which they linked positive or negative adjectives with self-centred terms like "me," "I," and "myself."

Those with high self-esteem associated words about themselves with positive adjectives. They opposite was true of participants with low self-esteem.

After letting participants look at their Facebook profiles, researchers found a marked increase in their self-esteem. That sudden burst, however, appeared to hurt participants' motivation to do well on the follow-up math test.

"We wanted to know if there are any additional psychological effects that stem from viewing your own self-enhancing profile," says Toma. "Does engaging with your own Facebook profile affect behaviour?"

Those who looked at their personal Facebook pages did more poorly on the follow-up assessment than those who didn't spend time checking out their profile pics.

Also see: Can Facebook make you depressed?

"Performing well in a task can boost feelings of self-worth," Toma says in a statement. "However, if you already feel good about yourself because you looked at your Facebook profile, there is no psychological need to increase your self-worth by doing well in a laboratory task."

Toma isn't drawing any sweeping conclusions from the simple study — she emphasizes that the results don't mean that college kids who spend a lot of time of Facebook are suffering academically because of it — and believes her study will be the first of many to evaluate the role of social media and self-esteem.

"This study shows that exposure to your own Facebook profile reduces motivation to perform well in a simple, hypothetical task," she says. "It does not show that Facebook use negatively affects college students' grades, for example. Future work is necessary to investigate the psychological effects of other Facebook activities, such as examining others' profiles or reading the newsfeed."

Another study found that staring at other people's profiles does the opposite of staring at your own: checking out your virtual friends' narcissistic pages can hurt the ego.

"People don't always understand that they, themselves put their best face forward on Facebook and so does everyone else," Toma tells ABC News. "It seems like everyone could be having more fun than you are or a more meaningful life. Facebook is a really multifaceted and complex psychological platform."