Online video calls via Zoom have become the most natural thing in the world since the outbreak of the corona virus. Some welcome it and others can’t get used to it. There’s a catch, according to a new study: Our mood gets worse the more we look at ourselves while zooming.
Researchers asked study participants to answer a few questions about their emotional state before and after the online conversations.
During the chats, where the participants could see both themselves and their conversation partners on the screen, they talked about topics such as their music preference and the things they liked or didn’t like about their place of residence. Some drank an alcoholic drink before the conversation, while others drank a non-alcoholic one. In general, the participants stared much more at their interlocutors than at themselves, the researchers found. But there were significant differences in the amount of time some participants spent staring at themselves. The more someone stares at themselves while in a virtual encounter, the more their mood drops.
“We used eye-tracking technology to investigate the association between mood, alcohol and attentional focus during virtual social interaction,” said Talia Ariss, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the study with psychology professor Catharine Fairbairn. “We found that participants who spent more time looking at themselves during the conversation felt worse after the conversation, even after controlling for negative mood before the interaction. And those who were under the influence of alcohol spent more time looking at themselves.”
By adding alcohol to the experiment and using the eye-tracking technology, the scientists were also able to determine how light intoxication affected where a person focused their attention. “In the context of face-to-face social interactions, there is strong evidence that alcohol acts as a social lubricant and has mood-elevating properties in drinkers,” explains Ariss. However, this was not true for the online conversations, where alcohol consumption corresponded to more self-centeredness and the typical mood-elevating effect did not occur. The more self-centered a person is, the more likely he or she is to report feeling emotions that correspond to things like anxiety and depression.”
“Many people have come to realize that virtual encounters are not the same as face-to-face,” concludes Prof. Fairbairn. “Many people struggle with fatigue and melancholy after a full day of meetings with Zoom.”
Indeed, the pandemic’s shift to virtual encounters has had several implications for people’s mental health. For example, such meetings can be lengthy, leading some to constantly focus on their appearance, which experts say can be harmful to mental health. Experts have also found that online encounters require more attention and energy than real-life encounters.
Zoom allows you to hide the display of your own video so that you cannot see yourself. You can read how to do that here.
Sources: University of Illinois, Neurosciencenews.com, Medicaldaily.com.