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Brain Activities Show There Is Nothing Like a Real Friend in Contrast to Influencers and Other Celebrities

Especially for young people, influencers and other celebrities followed on social media evoke affective closeness that in their young minds seems real even though it is fake. Such fake friendships are potentially problematic because of their felt reality on the consumer side while lacking any invers...

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Autores principales: Walla, Peter, Külzer, Dimitrios, Leeb, Annika, Moidl, Lena, Kalt, Stefan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10216540/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37239305
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13050831
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author Walla, Peter
Külzer, Dimitrios
Leeb, Annika
Moidl, Lena
Kalt, Stefan
author_facet Walla, Peter
Külzer, Dimitrios
Leeb, Annika
Moidl, Lena
Kalt, Stefan
author_sort Walla, Peter
collection PubMed
description Especially for young people, influencers and other celebrities followed on social media evoke affective closeness that in their young minds seems real even though it is fake. Such fake friendships are potentially problematic because of their felt reality on the consumer side while lacking any inversely felt true closeness. The question arises if the unilateral friendship of a social media user is equal or at least similar to real reciprocal friendship. Instead of asking social media users for explicit responses (conscious deliberation), the present exploratory study aimed to answer this question with the help of brain imaging technology. Thirty young participants were first invited to provide individual lists including (i) twenty names of their most followed and loved influencers or other celebrities (fake friend names), (ii) twenty names of loved real friends and relatives (real friend names) as well as (iii) twenty names they do not feel any closeness to (no friend names). They then came to the Freud CanBeLab (Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and Behavior Lab) where they were shown their selected names in a random sequence (two rounds), while their brain activities were recorded via electroencephalography (EEG) and later calculated into event-related potentials (ERPs). We found short (ca. 100 ms) left frontal brain activity starting at around 250 ms post-stimulus to process real friend and no friend names similarly, while both ERPs differed from those elicited by fake friend names. This is followed by a longer effect (ca. 400 ms), where left and right frontal and temporoparietal ERPs also differed between fake and real friend names, but at this later processing stage, no friend names elicited similar brain activities to fake friend names in those regions. In general, real friend names elicited the most negative going brain potentials (interpreted as highest brain activation levels). These exploratory findings represent objective empirical evidence that the human brain clearly distinguishes between influencers or other celebrities and close people out of real life even though subjective feelings of closeness and trust can be similar. In summary, brain imaging shows there is nothing like a real friend. The findings of this study might be seen as a starting point for future studies using ERPs to investigate social media impact and topics such as fake friendship.
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spelling pubmed-102165402023-05-27 Brain Activities Show There Is Nothing Like a Real Friend in Contrast to Influencers and Other Celebrities Walla, Peter Külzer, Dimitrios Leeb, Annika Moidl, Lena Kalt, Stefan Brain Sci Article Especially for young people, influencers and other celebrities followed on social media evoke affective closeness that in their young minds seems real even though it is fake. Such fake friendships are potentially problematic because of their felt reality on the consumer side while lacking any inversely felt true closeness. The question arises if the unilateral friendship of a social media user is equal or at least similar to real reciprocal friendship. Instead of asking social media users for explicit responses (conscious deliberation), the present exploratory study aimed to answer this question with the help of brain imaging technology. Thirty young participants were first invited to provide individual lists including (i) twenty names of their most followed and loved influencers or other celebrities (fake friend names), (ii) twenty names of loved real friends and relatives (real friend names) as well as (iii) twenty names they do not feel any closeness to (no friend names). They then came to the Freud CanBeLab (Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and Behavior Lab) where they were shown their selected names in a random sequence (two rounds), while their brain activities were recorded via electroencephalography (EEG) and later calculated into event-related potentials (ERPs). We found short (ca. 100 ms) left frontal brain activity starting at around 250 ms post-stimulus to process real friend and no friend names similarly, while both ERPs differed from those elicited by fake friend names. This is followed by a longer effect (ca. 400 ms), where left and right frontal and temporoparietal ERPs also differed between fake and real friend names, but at this later processing stage, no friend names elicited similar brain activities to fake friend names in those regions. In general, real friend names elicited the most negative going brain potentials (interpreted as highest brain activation levels). These exploratory findings represent objective empirical evidence that the human brain clearly distinguishes between influencers or other celebrities and close people out of real life even though subjective feelings of closeness and trust can be similar. In summary, brain imaging shows there is nothing like a real friend. The findings of this study might be seen as a starting point for future studies using ERPs to investigate social media impact and topics such as fake friendship. MDPI 2023-05-21 /pmc/articles/PMC10216540/ /pubmed/37239305 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13050831 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Walla, Peter
Külzer, Dimitrios
Leeb, Annika
Moidl, Lena
Kalt, Stefan
Brain Activities Show There Is Nothing Like a Real Friend in Contrast to Influencers and Other Celebrities
title Brain Activities Show There Is Nothing Like a Real Friend in Contrast to Influencers and Other Celebrities
title_full Brain Activities Show There Is Nothing Like a Real Friend in Contrast to Influencers and Other Celebrities
title_fullStr Brain Activities Show There Is Nothing Like a Real Friend in Contrast to Influencers and Other Celebrities
title_full_unstemmed Brain Activities Show There Is Nothing Like a Real Friend in Contrast to Influencers and Other Celebrities
title_short Brain Activities Show There Is Nothing Like a Real Friend in Contrast to Influencers and Other Celebrities
title_sort brain activities show there is nothing like a real friend in contrast to influencers and other celebrities
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10216540/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37239305
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13050831
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