Previous studies have tended to lump together all social media activity and communication with close friends and acquaintances. In addition to being more accurate than relying on people's recollections of their online activity via commonly used surveys, this enabled Burke and Kraut to distinguish between types of activity-posting, passive reading, comments, likes, etc.-and whether the interactions were with people whom the users cared about or with lesser acquaintances. The content of the users' interactions was not analyzed. All participants opted in to the study and their data were de-identified and analyzed in aggregate. The new study was able to resolve this "chicken-or-egg" dilemma by using Facebook logs to examine counts of participants' actual Facebook activity.- over a period of months. "You're left to wonder-is it that unhappy people are using social media, or is social media affecting happiness?" Kraut said. The findings by Burke and Robert Kraut, a professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, run counter to many previous studies based on user surveys, which often have shown that time spent on social media is associated with a greater likelihood of loneliness and depression. Sixty comments from close friends in a month were associated with increases in users' psychological well-being as large as those associated with major life events, the study found. The content may be uplifting, and the mere act of communication reminds recipients of the meaningful relationships in their lives." The important thing is that someone such as a close friend takes the time to personalize it. "This can be a comment that's just a sentence or two. in human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon. "We're not talking about anything that's particularly labor-intensive," said Moira Burke, a research scientist at Facebook who earned a Ph.D. What really makes people feel good is when those they know and care about write personalized posts or comments. Passively reading posts or one-click feedback such as "likes" don't move the needle. But not just any interaction has these positive effects.