Do social media foster or curtail adolescents' empathy? A longitudinal study

Abstract

Recently, concerns have been raised that adolescents' prolific social media use may cause them to become less empathic. However, direct empirical evidence is missing and research suggests that social media use can also be beneficial for adolescents' psychosocial development. The present study aims to investigate whether and how social media use influences empathy. We surveyed 942 Dutch adolescents (10-14 years) twice, with a one-year interval. The results showed that social media use is related to an increase in cognitive and affective empathy over time. Specifically, adolescents' social media use improved both their ability to understand (cognitive empathy) and share the feelings of their peers (affective empathy).