If you are the kind who spends hours of your workday on Facebook and other social media sites -- and let's face it, who doesn't! -- here's some good news for you.

Findings of a new Pew Research Center study say that Facebook could make you more trusting, enable closer relationships in your life, ensure more emotional support in times of need and, hey, even prod you into more involvement in politics.

The study is said to highlight a new type of "digital divide" -- the nearly 20 percent of Americans who are not Internet users and missing out on those same social networking benefits, and when you consider that in India the chasm between the Net haves and have-nots is wider, it becomes applicable here as well.

"If people on Facebook are getting all these great rewards, then there's a group of people out there who are really bad off," said Keith Hampton, the report's lead author and an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, has been quoted as saying. "They have the smallest social network, fewer close ties, are way less likely to vote and are less involved with neighbors," he said in an interview.

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