Article summary of Do social media foster or curtail adolescents’ empathy? A longitudinal study by Vossen & Valkenburg - Chapter

Introduction

Because of the rise in social media use, there has been a rise in research that investigates the influence of social media use on adolescents' psycho-social development. The studies show that social media use can have a positive effect on different aspects of psycho-social development, such as on self-esteem, friendship closeness and social competence. Even though some studies have reported negative effects of social media on some aspects of psycho-social development such as on self-esteem and mood, these studies often focused on problematic or disordered internet and social media use.

An important aspect of psycho-social development, which is empathy, has not been investigated a lot in relationship to social media use. Empathy is defined as the ability to experience and understand the feelings of others. Empathy leads to that people are able to experience and understand the feelings of other people. This is especially important during adolescence, in which developing close and meaningful relationships with peers is a very important goal. Empathy is a leading force during this. There are some concerns about whether empathy is declining among adolescents. These concerns exist because of a meta-analysis, which showed that empathy scores among American college students declined over the last ten years. The authors of the meta-analysis suggested that this would be due to increased use of internet and especially increased use of social media. This is not a weird suggestion, because it is true that a lot of adolescents spend hours on social media. 

There are some arguments for why social media use may negatively affect empathy. The first argument is that, even though social media  might facilitate making new friends and connecting with others online, this might not necessarily lead to enhanced social skills during offline interactions. Also, spending time only displaces spending time with people offline, which can lead to that social skills will deteriorate over time. The second argument for why social media is bad for empathy, is that there are reduced nonverbal cues. This may hinder empathy, because it makes it difficult to tell how a friend is really feeling without seeing their facial expressions or body posture. The third argument is: because people are anonymous on social media, this leads to more fuzzy boundaries on what is appropriate social behavior. It may also lead to deindividuation, which is a state of decreased self-evaluation that leads to anti-normative and disinhibited behavior. Konrath, a researcher, states that deindividuation in combination with the greater interpersonal and physical distance on social media, may lead to that people ignore the feelings of others and become less empathetic. 

However, these arguments are not supported by evidence. There are only two studies conducted that looked at the relation between social media use and empathy. They found no significant relation between social media use and empathy. But, these studies included activities such as 'online gaming and browsing the internet' as a measure of only activity. The other study found a positive rather than a negative relation between Facebook use and empathy. This is in line with a previous finding which showed that adolescents often use social media to practice social skills such as self-presentation and self-disclosure and that these skills are transferable to offline interactions. 

There are also some counterarguments for why social media may lead to lower empathy. For example, evn though there are less nonverbal cues on social media, a review showed that there are no differences in the intensity of expressing emotions between online and face-to-face communications. Also, contemporary social media is not as anonymous as is described by Konrath. Most of the adolescents use the internet and social media to maintain the relationships with their friends. 

Because there have not been many studies conducted into the relationship between social media use and empathy, this study aims to do this by using a longitudinal design. The second aim of this study is to also specify the relationship between social media and empathy. Empathy is multidimensional: it consists of a cognitive and an affective component. These components are differentially linked to behavioral outcomes. It is not known whether social media is related to both components or just to one particular component. 

The authors state that it is important to look at the relationship between social media use and empathy, because research has shown that high levels of empathy have many positive outcomes, such as more prosocial behavior and less aggressive behavior. 

Social media and empathy: theoretical propositions

Empathy is very important for a healthy social functioning of adolescents. Empathy develops through experiences with social interactions. For example, if we see people throwing a ball, certain brain regions are activated. This same mechanism applies to emotions. Seeing someone else's emotions, activates own representations of emotions. This leads to "state-matching". The more social interactions someone experiences, the more easily representations of emotions become available to us. This increases empathy. The question now is whether social media use also leads to forming representations.

As mentioned before, a reason for why social media would be bad for empathy is that it involves less nonverbal cues. Earlier, theories about computer mediated communication (CMC) also thought that communication via text-based applications would lead to worse representations compared to richer, face-to-face communication. This was also called cue-filtered out theories. These theories received little empirical support. Later, these theories were substituted for more positive theories about computer mediated communication. According to these positive theories, this kind of communication would help people to present themselves in optimal ways. The recipients of these self-representations can also fill in the blanks in their impressions of their partners, which cam lead to idealization. Computer mediated communication can therefore become "hyperpersonal", which means that users experience a greater level of intimacy and share more information than in face-to-face communication. There is empirical support for the hyperpersonal communication theory.

The authors state that, based on the computer mediated communication theory and the empirical support for these theories, it is better to expect that social media use has positive effects on adolescents. For example, it provides adolescents with the opportunity to share emotions with others. Therefore, the hypothesis in this study is that there is a positive relation between social media and empathy.

The specificity of the relation between social media and empathy

So, empathy is a multidimensional construct. It consists of an affective and a cognitive component. The affective component is about sharing someone else's emotions. The cognitive component is about understanding and recognizing other people's emotions. These are related, but distinct components. They do not always co-occur. There are also different brain regions involved for both components and they are differently related to specific social behaviors. Therefore, if it is true that social media affects empathy, it is important to know which component it affects. The Perception Action Model states that imagining emotions of others involves cognitive empathy mor than directly observing emotions of others. And, because it is true that during computer mediated communication the person is not physically present and nonverbal cues are not so available, it is expected that social media use would lead to more cognitive empathy skills. The authors of the article hypothesize that social media will have a positive effect on affective empathy and on cognitive empathy, but the effect will be stronger for cognitive empathy compared to affective empathy.

There is also something to be said about sympathy. Affective empathy and sympathy resemble each other, but the difference lies in that empathy is defined as 'feeling with' someone and sympathy is defined as 'feeling for' someone. To elaborate, sympathy, unlike empathy, is an automatic response which relates to suffering or distress of others. However, in previous research on empathy, this distinction has not been always been taken into account. Therefore, many studies that wanted to study empathy, actually studied sympathy. So, the studies that found that social media would affect empathy, may actually have found that social media decreases sympathy, instead of empathy.

Methods

Participants

A large, private research institute in the Netherlands has collected the data for this study. There were a total of 516 families with at least two children between the ages of 10 tot 14 who participated. These families were recruited via an existing online panel. 

Measures

Social media use

Social media use was operationalized as the frequency of usage of social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Skype. There were two questions to measure this: "How many days of the week do you use social network sites?" and "On the days that you use social network sites, how much time do you spend on this per day?". 

Empathy and sympathy

The Adolescent Measure of Empathy and Sympathy (AMES) was used to measure affective empathy, cognitive empathy and sympathy. The affective empathy scale consists of four items and an example of an item is: "When a friend is scared, I feel afraid". The cognitive empathy scale consists of four items and an example of an item is: "I can tell when someone acts happy, when they actually are not". The sympathy scale consists of four items and an example of an item is: "I feel sorry for someone who is treated unfairly". 

Discussion

So, previous research have suggested that social media would have a negative influence on empathy. However, because the literature was scarce, the aim of this study was to look at the influence of social media use on adolescents' empathy. And, because empathy is multidimensional and has often falsely been equated with sympathy, the authors wanted to look at differences in effects between cognitive empathy, affective empathy and sympathy. Overall, the findings suggest that social media use can have a beneficial effect on empathy.

The longitudinal effect of social media on empathy

The authors hypothesized that social media use would have a positive effect on both affective and cognitive empathy. The findings of this study support this hypothesis. In more detail, it showed that adolescents who make more use of social media, improve their ability to share and understand the feelings of others. 

Also, the authors investigated whether affective empathy, cognitive empathy and sympathy are differently related to social media use. Because of the fact that there is often no face-to-face interaction in online communication and therefore individuals have to imagine the emotional state of others, the authors hypothesized that social media would have a bigger effect on cognitive empathy than on affective empathy. The results of this study did not support this hypothesis. So, this suggests that it is less important to distinguish between the two components of empathy when investigating social media use. However, this finding could also suggest that a development in one of the components of empathy, benefits the other component as well. 

When it comes to sympathy, the findings showed no significant relationship with empathy.