June 25, 2008 -- People who are more socially isolated in real life tend to be more isolated in the virtual world of social networking web sites like Facebook, new research suggests.
Facebook users in the study who reported feeling anxiety and fear in their face-to-face relationships spent more time on Facebook than their more socially comfortable peers.
But they also had fewer Facebook friends, Louisiana State University doctoral student Pavica Sheldon reports.
The study included 172 Louisiana State students, most of whom were current Facebook users.
"Our results seem to justify the rich-get-richer hypothesis, which states that the Internet primarily benefits extroverted individuals, and that introverts communicate online less often," Sheldon writes in the latest issue of the Journal of Media Psychology.
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