Norwegian researcher Cecilie Schou Andreassen says, according to this article in The Atlantic, that people who can’t get enough of the social network Facebook show many of the same signs associated with gambling addiction. These signs can include mood swings and signs of withdrawal.
Andreassen said to The Atlantic in an email that Facebook users fit the criteria of addiction in other areas too, even though it is not a chemical addiction. She said this is because all addictions, whether they are chemical or non-chemical, appear to have six core components.
They include the following, she says:
- Salience — the activity dominates thinking and behavior;
- Mood Modification — the activity modifies/improves mood;
- Tolerance — increasing amounts of the activity are required to achieve initial effects;
- Withdrawal — the occurrence of unpleasant feelings when the activity is discontinued or suddenly; reduced;
- Conflict — the activity causes conflicts in social relationships and other activities;
- Relapse — the tendency for reversion to earlier patterns of the activity after abstinence or control.
To measure the addiction, six questions were accessed relating to each of the above components. The questions can be found in The Atlantic.
But not all are convinced. A British psychologist at Nottingham Trent University, Mark Griffiths, says the idea of Facebook addiction is in a word, too broad.
“The real issue here concerns […] what people are actually addicted [to],” Griffiths writes in his publication, Facebook Addiction: Concerns Criticism and Recommendations — A Response to Andreassen and Colleagues, “Facebook addiction as a term may already be obsolete because there are many activities that a person can engage in on the medium.”
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