Who hasn’t logged onto Facebook and pored through an ex’s page, looking at old posts and clicking on the photo of the girl or guy who took their place?

登陆Facebook上前任的主页，查看那些旧日志和他或她的新欢的照片，这事儿你也干过吧？

If a new study is to be believed, the vast majority of people are guilty of post-breakup cyber-snooping.

如果一项最近的调查结果可信的话，大多数人会为分手后依然在网上窥视前任的一举一动而有罪恶感。

According to a Masters thesis written by a student at University of Western Ontario in Canada, as many as 88 per cent of people - nearly nine of ten - check up on their former boyfriends or girlfriends on the popular social media site, the Toronto Star reported.

据《多伦多明星报》报道，来自加拿大西安大略大学的一名学生在她的硕士论文中写道，88%也就是将近90%的人，会在流行的社交媒体上继续关注他们前任男女朋友的动态。

Jilted lovers signed on to friends’ accounts to spy on the person who dumped them. They deleted photos reminding them of happier times, read long-forgotten wall posts and scrutinized their potential replacement.

失恋的人们借用朋友的账号暗中监视那些甩掉他们的人。他们会删掉那些让人想起快乐旧时光的照片，重读那些遗忘已久的日志，并且密切关注对方可能的下一任。

‘It’s so interesting right now, so different from before this technology existed. Once you broke up in the past, it was over,’ media studies graduate student Veronika Lukacs, 25, told the Star after successfully defending her thesis titled ‘It’s Complicated: Romantic breakups and their aftermath on Facebook.’

“自从社交媒体这项科技出现后，分手后的情况就和过去不同了，变得很有意思。在过去如果你们分手了，就意味着一切都结束了，” 这名25岁的传媒专业研究生瓦伦尼卡-卢卡斯面对《多伦多明星报》采访时这样说。她已经成功结束了自己的论文答辩，她的论文题目为《没那么简单：情侣分手后在社交媒体上的表现》。

Lukacs said her analysis of Facebook as it relates to breakups has serious social implications. ‘Nearly everyone is participating in these behaviors, it’s very very common,’ she said.

卢卡斯说她之所以会分析Facebook是因为它关系到情侣的分手，而这有着深远的社交影响。“几乎每个人都做过这样的事情，这是一种非常非常普遍的现象”，她说。

The student also found that 48 per cent of people remain Facebook friends with their ex after they break up and 74 per cent had tried to keep tabs on their former partner’s new flame.

卢卡斯还发现，48%的人和前任分手后在Facebook上依然保持好友关系，而74%的人会密切关注前任新欢的动向。

Of those who were no longer Facebook friends, 70 per cent admitted using a mutual friend's profile to check on their ex.

而对于那些分手后解除了Facebook好友关系的人，当中有70%承认他们会借用某个共同好友的账号来查看前任的主页。

'At the end of the day, Facebook does present very serious challenges for people getting over a breakup,' Lukacs said. 'It’s a much more serious issue than a lot of people think.'

“表明，Facebook确实对人们度过分手时期的痛苦带来了严峻的挑战，”卢卡斯说。“这比很多人想象的更加严峻。”

Surveillance of someone on Facebook, or ‘creeping,’ did not follow the patterns Lukacs had foreshadowed‘I had expected people who were not Facebook friends with their ex-partners would be less distressed.

在Facebook上监视或追踪某人的行动，也并不都是按照卢卡斯预料的模式进行。“我原以为那些和前任不再是Facebook好友的人会不那么痛苦。”

‘We found the opposite was true. People who had 'unfriended' their partners had higher levels of distress. Based on interviewing people, I’m thinking that people who are the most distressed are the ones who delete their partners,’ she explained.

“结果我们发现正好相反。那些和前任解除了好友关系的人反而更加痛苦。根据我们的调查访问，我认为最痛苦的就是那些把前任从好友中删除的人，” 她解释说。

Less surprisingly, the rejected partners who were most upset by the split were also the most avid stalkers.

不难想象，那些被前任甩掉、而且对于分手最伤心的人，也恰恰是最热衷于在社交媒体上窥探前任举动的人。

As part of her study, Lukacs surveyed 107 people over age 18 who had their heart broken in the previous 12 months. Three-quarters of them attended University of Western Ontario.

作为研究的一部分，卢卡斯调查了107名年龄在18岁以上，且过去一年里有过心痛的分手经历的人，其中3/4就读于西安大略大学。

‘A lot of people who I had interviewed talked about their surveillance behaviour and how they knew it wasn’t good for them and yet somehow they were doing it anyway,’ she said. ‘Rationality didn’t play a role for them.’

“我访问过的许多人都提到了自己在社交媒体上监视前任的行为，他们明白这样做对自己并无益处，但还是忍不住要去做，”卢卡斯说。“理性对他们完全不起作用。”

One man Lukacs interviewed confessed that he had hacked into his ex-girlfriend’s Facebook account.

卢卡斯访问过的一名男子承认，他曾经入侵过前女友的Facebook账户。

‘He never thought he was the kind of person who would do that. He was really embarrassed,’ she said, adding that it is a good idea to change the Facebook password after a breakup.

“他之前从不认为自己会是做这种事的人。他对此深感羞愧，”卢卡斯说。她还建议在分手后应该修改Facebook的账户密码。

While deleting an ex from your friends list may seem like a viable solution to the problem, Lukacs said it is not entirely effective. In addition, it is generally considered rude to ‘unfriend’ someone on Facebook, so many people are hesitant to sever that last tie.

尽管把前任从你的好友名单中删除似乎是一个可行的解决办法，但卢卡斯认为这并不真的有效。此外，由于在Facebook上解除与某人的好友关系通常被视为不礼貌的，许多人因此而犹豫，并不愿切断这个和前任的联系。