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Dear A Moment of Science,
亲爱的《科学一刻》栏目组：

I’m not a big Facebook user, but I have friends who are. And I’ve noticed that some of them are constantly updating their status. Where some people might post a message once a day, others seem to be posting something every few minutes. Can science help explain this phenomenon?
我不是“脸谱”的忠实用户，但是我的一些朋友是。我注意到，一些人总是很频繁在脸谱上更新个人状态，一些人一天会发布一条消息，另外一些人看上去没几分钟就会发布一次消息，科学能对这种现象给予解释么？

Interesting question. Of course, there are many reasons why people join and post stuff on Facebook. But researchers have begun to study the phenomenon you describe. And they found that copious¹ posting on Facebook may have something to do with loneliness.
有趣的问题，尽管每个人注册脸谱并发布信息的原因不尽相同，但是科学家已经对你所提到的现象进行研究，他们发现频繁的在脸谱上发布消息可能与孤独有关。

Being Lonely
孤独的意义

Specifically, the researchers found that people who update their status more often report feeling less lonely than people who post less often.
特别要一提的是，科学家发现经常更新状态的人比不经常更新状态的人要感觉更不孤独。

Now, granted, the study looked at only 100 undergraduate students, around half of whom were instructed to update their status more frequently than they normally would. And then they self reported on their levels of loneliness, happiness, depression, and so on. So this question requires more in depth research.
Feeling Happy
当然，这项研究只对100名大学生进行研究，其中半数被研究者受到研究的指导性影响而比平时更频繁地更新状态。然后让这些同学自己报告各自的幸福感、孤独感、失落感等等。因此这个问题需要更深入的研究。

Still, it’s a noteworthy finding. Interestingly, the students who posted more did not report feeling happier, or less or more depressed². So status updates seem to have something to do specifically with feeling less lonely and more socially connected.
但这仍是一个值得关注的发现。有趣的是，经常发布消息的学生并没有感到更幸福或者或多或少的失落，看上去，更新状态会减少个人的孤独感以及增强社会归属感。

What I find even more interesting is that it did not seem to matter whether the students got any “Likes” or responses to their posts. Just the act of updating their status was enough to make them feel less lonely.
我注意到另外一个有趣的地方是，学生发布的信息是否得到别人的“赞”或者回应都无所谓，更新自己状态这件事本身就可以让他们感到不那么孤独。