A study has probed the effects of Facebook use on the well-being of young people, finding that it does not seem to help.

With over 500 million daily users; Facebook is an incredibly large part of many peoples’ lives, particularly in the school-aged demographic, many teachers will confirm. Now researchers from the French Hubert Curien Multidisciplinary Institute have used ‘experience-sampling’ to assess how the social network affects its users.

Scientists text-messaged participants five times a day for two weeks to examine how Facebook use influences the two components of subjective well-being: how people feel moment-to-moment and how satisfied they are with their lives.

The results have now been published and indicate Facebook use creates negative shifts in both variables over time. The more people used Facebook at one time, the worse they felt the next time they were text-messaged; the more they used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time.

The report concluded that “on the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it.”

The study was conducted on a miniscule fraction of the site’s user base; just 82 people, all of which lived in the city of Michigan.

The report has now been published online.