You've heard the saying misery loves company? That's especially true on social media.

Researchers at Ohio State found that when a person is in a bad mood, you're more likely to check in on Facebook friends who are even more miserable than you're feeling.

Typically, we like to spend time checking out profiles of happy, successful Facebook friends. But when we're hanging out in the dumpster of life, patrolling those types of pages only makes us feel worse according to the study.

So what do we do? We stop by and check in on all of our loser friends for an instant self-esteem boost.

The researchers had 168 volunteers take a meaningless test, just so they could lie to half of them and say they failed. That in turn put them in a bad mood.

Then they asked everyone to check out a social media networking site they had constructed containing a bunch of fake profiles, that included things like a "hotness rating" and a meter that showed the person's career success.

The test subjects that were in bad moods were far more likely to gravitate to the profiles of "ugly" people with bad jobs.

All those Debbie downer types did it for the sole purpose of trying to make themselves feel better about their situations.

How sad is that huh?

 

 

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