By Sharon Tibenda

6^th January 2012:

A controversial new study that is due to be published in the Journal of Psychological Science has claimed that most users and or funs of social media networks like Twitter and Facebook find it more difficult to resist the urge to log onto the social networks than they do with the urge to have sex.

“…People may experience strong urges for sex and sleep over the course of the day, but the urge to check Twitter and other social media sites is actually more difficult to resist,” the study will say.  According to The Guardian newspaper, researchers gave BlackBerrys to 205 people between the ages of 18 and 25 in the German city of Wurtzburg and monitored them for seven consecutive days.

Seven times per day, participants were asked to send a message describing the type and strength of urges they had experienced within the last 30 minutes.  Researchers then evaluated the responses – all 10,588 of them, and discovered that the respondents were more likely to give into the urge to check social media sites like Twitter as their willpower dwindled during the course of the day.

In contrast to prevailing beliefs that people experience irresistibly strong desires for tobacco, alcohol, and coffee, most participants reported feeling relatively low urges for those substances, head researcher Wilhelm Hofmann told The Guardian.

“…People were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money,” Hofmann said.  He however pointed out that sex and other strong urges reported by participants are a lot less accessible during an average day than social media.

The study also drew comparisons between social media and alcohol or cigarettes.  “…There’s also the argument to be made that social media is just as harmful, forcing someone to recede from the world and into a safe little bubble of status updates and tweets, where human beings aren’t troublesome animals but easily compartmentalized profiles,” Dave Thier wrote in a blog post on the study.

He however qualified his argument and said it’s a little easier to make the harm argument with cigarettes.  He also said schools might want to take that point into consideration when planning substance abuse curriculum, considering the number of young people signing up for Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

According to researchers who asked college students around the world to go for 24 hours without accessing the web, social networking is such a huge part of the daily life of college students that many who are deprived of the internet often exhibit symptoms similar to those in drug withdrawal.

“…Students talked about how scary it was, how addicted they were,” lead researcher Susan Moeller told The Telegraph newspaper.  She added that while many expected the frustration, they didn’t expect to have the psychological effects of being “…lonely…the anxiety, and heart palpitations.” END:  Please login to www.ugandacorrespondent.com every Monday to read our top stories and anytime mid-week for our news updates.