Keyword 1: Emotional Processing - How we handle emotions in the digital age. Are we becoming less emotional now that we're BFFs with the Internet and emojis? 🥺

Keyword 2: Empathy - It's a big word but in simple terms, empathy is being able to understand and share someone else's feelings. It's a mix of thinking (cognitive) and feeling (emotional) components. Think of it as putting on someone else's shoes and actually feeling if they're too tight, not just knowing that they might be. 👟💭

Keyword 3: Online Interaction - This is where we switch our chit-chat from cafes and parks to chat boxes and comments section. 📲 💻

Real World Example: Think about your friend's post on Instagram, sharing about a tough day. We can still feel sad for them, right? Even though it's just text and maybe a gloomy picture, not a face-to-face interaction.

• Studies show empathy scores are dropping like your phone's battery during a TikTok spree. Today's college students are reportedly less empathetic than their counterparts from 30 years ago, which coincides with the digital era's onset.

• Carrier et al's study from 2015 dives into this subject with a hefty sample size of 1,726 digital era born participants. Their findings are intriguing:

Online activities that lead to face-to-face communication = Boosts empathy 🚀

Online activities that don't lead to face-to-face communication = Reduces empathy 📉

A twist in the plot: Video gaming reduces real-world empathy, no matter how much offline chit-chat time you get. 🎮❌

Real-world empathy and virtual empathy were found to be cousins who like each other (positively correlated), but virtual empathy scores were still lower.

Fun Fact: Your online conversations lack non-verbal cues like facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice, which may explain why virtual empathy scores are a bit down in the dumps. 🎭

The Big Conclusion: Don't blame digital technology as a whole for reducing empathy! The culprit might be specific activities that don't encourage face-to-face communication. Video games, we're looking at you! 🕹️👀

The study isn't perfect, though. It used convenience sampling (not always representative), self-report measures (hello, bias!), and was correlational (doesn't show cause-effect, just relationships).