THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYfor socially anxious people who find in-the-flesh interactions difficult.
Research presented by Ben Ainley and his colleagues at the Associa-
tion for Psychological Science annual conference in 2009, for example,
showed that students who were lonely offline also tended to have fewer
contacts online on sites like Facebook. Ainley concluded that “some of
the obstacles to feeling connected in everyday life exist in virtual envi-
ronments as well”.
Although Facebook and similar sites are clearly no panacea for loneli-
ness, numerous studies have hinted at their benefits. A 2006 study by
Andrew Campbell and his team at the University of Sydney found no
links between Internet use and anxiety, depression or social fearful-
ness, while those study participants who used the net for “online chat”
told the researchers that they found their time online psychologically
beneficial. The following year, a Michigan State University study led by
Nicole Ellison reported that undergraduates who were regular users of
Facebook tended to feel as if they were more a part of their university
community than did less frequent users, and that Facebook use also
helped students keep in touch with old friends from school.
Recognizing faces
Facial recognition is a vital skill in human relationships. Much like one
pebble on a beach when compared to another, human faces are essen-
tially pretty similar: all approximately spherical, with two eyes, a mouth
and a nose. And yet most of us are expert at distinguishing one face
from the next – and what’s more, remembering which face belongs to
which person. Even dim lighting and strange angles provide little chal-
lenge. But the science behind our face expertise is actually something
of a battle zone between psychologists. There are fierce disagreements
about whether this skill is innate or whether it is learned just like any
other form of visual expertise, such as that displayed by a butterfly
enthusiast distinguishing between obscure species.
The psychologists in the “face recognition is innate” camp point to
the fact that looking at faces appears to activate a dedicated region of
the brain in the temporal lobe, dubbed the fusiform-face area. People
with brain damage to this region lose the ability to recognize faces,
but their skill at distinguishing between other kinds of object remains
unaffected. Supporters of the innate theory also highlight the so-called
face-inversion effect, first described by Robert Yin in the 1960s, which
suggests that turning faces upside down seems to have a detrimental