Virtual empathy: Positive and negative impacts of going online upon empathy in young adults

We tested if going online displaces face-to-face time and negatively impacts empathy.Internet usage, face-to-face time, and empathy were measured in 1390 young adults.Going online had little impact upon empathy and improved face-to-face time.Video gaming reduced empathy in both sexes but did not reduce face-to-face time.Virtual empathy was positively correlated with, but lower than, real-world empathy. People can show empathic responses to others online, but at the same time empathy has been declining in young people since technology-based communication has become prevalent. Displacement of face-to-face time by online activities would be expected to negatively impact empathic skills. Since there is little direct empirical research on this topic, the present study sought to determine the nature of the relationship between Internet usage and empathy. More than 1000 young adults completed an anonymous online questionnaire that asked about daily media usage, real-world empathy, virtual empathy, social support and demographic information. The results showed that, in general, going online had very small negative impacts upon cognitive and affective real-world empathy and actually improved time spent in face-to-face communication. Video gaming reduced real-world empathy in both females and males but did not reduce face-to-face time. Also, virtual empathy was positively correlated with real-world empathy, although virtual empathy scores were lower than real-world empathy scores for both sexes. Finally, both real-world empathy and virtual empathy are positively related to social support but real-world empathy demonstrated a 5-6 times stronger relationship. The findings show that spending time online does not displace face-to-face time nor reduce real-world empathy, and suggest that perhaps the lack of nonverbal cues in the online world contributes to overall lower levels of virtual empathy compared to the real world. The negative effects of being online upon empathy appear to be due to specific activities such as video gaming rather than total quantity of online time.

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