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I don't know the answer yet but here is the Part 1 of the passage...
Like it or love it, social media is a major part of life. Teens spend more than half of their waking hours online. They use some of that time to post pictures and create profiles on social media accounts. But most of what they do is read and respond to posts by friends and family.
Clicking on a thumbs-up or a heart icon is an easy way to stay in touch. But those “likes” can have power that goes beyond a simple connection. Some social media sites use those likes to determine how many people eventually see a post. One with many likes is more likely to be seen — and to get even more likes.
What’s more, viewing posts with a lot of likes activates the reward system in our brain. It also can lower the viewer’s self-control. And posts related to alcohol may encourage teens to drink. That means that what you like online has the power to influence not just what others like, but even what they do.
POPULARITY ON THE BRAIN
It’s no surprise: Feedback from peers affects how teens behave. And not always in a good way. For example, in one 2011 study, teens doing a driving task in a lab took more risks when their friends were around. Researchers also looked at the teens’ brains during this task. They saw activity in a part of the brain that’s involved in rewards. This area is known as the nucleus accumbens. That suggests the teens were changing their behavior to try to get social approval, explains Lauren Sherman. She's a cognitive neuroscientist at Temple University in Philadelphia, Penn. Cognitive neuroscientists are researchers who study the brain.
Joining social media can give people a sense of being in the know. But posts may exaggerate how well our friends and others are feeling, making them appear much happier than we are. And that can, inappropriately, make us feel less successful than them.
Sherman wanted to know whether teens make similar changes to their behavior when they use social media. To find out, she and her team recruited 32 teens for their study, last year. The participants submitted photos from their personal Instagram accounts.
The researchers mixed the teens' photos with other pictures from public Instagram accounts. Then they randomly gave half of the images many likes (between 23 and 45; most had more than 30). They gave the other half no more than 22 likes (most had fewer than 15). The participant's own pictures were evenly divided between getting many or few likes.
