Will using Facebook affect empathy and replace social support in university students?

Objectives The current research has three primary hypotheses: (i) There is a positive relationship between the use of Facebook word messages and cognitive empathy in university students. (ii) There is a positive relationship between participating in the Facebook video and affective empathy in university students. (iii) Virtual affective and cognitive empathy cannot replicate real-world affective and cognitive empathy regarding a feeling of being emotionally supported in university students on Facebook but can replicate the feeling of being informationally supported in university students on Facebook . Design Three different scales on a questionnaire have been used to investigate the usage of Facebook, empathy level and the degree of social support. A modified version of the Facebook usage scale (14 items) has been used to measure the usage of Facebook word messages and video. The Basic Empathy Scale has been used to measure both the cognitive (9 items) and affective empathy (11 items) levels of the respondents. A modified version of the basic empathy scale has been used to examine virtual empathy. The Medical Outcomes Study (MOS) social support scale has been used to study the degree of social support which is accessible to the participants when they need it. Four emotional and four informational support items (eight items in total) have been selected by the researchers from within the 18 support items . Methods The 204 participants are volunteer international and UK university students, randomly recruited from Facebook groups and from among the personal friends of the researcher. The participants were invited to complete questionnaires through a link to a third-part survey website, Qualtrics. A correlation and regression analysis from SPSS has been used to investigate the data . Results There is a weak positive correlation between Facebook word messages and cognitive empathy. The correlation between Facebook word messages and cognitive empathy was significant. There is a weak negative correlation between Facebook video and affective empathy. The correlation between Facebook video and cognitive empathy was not significant. Virtual affective and cognitive empathy on Facebook cannot replicate real world affective and cognitive empathy with regard to the feeling of receiving emotional support and informational support . Conclusions University students who have a higher frequency of interacting with word messages on Facebook seem to be more skilful in understanding and identifying the emotions of others. Exposure to video on Facebook may not enhance university students’ affective empathy. Moreover, emotional and informational support online may only act as supplements rather than replacements for emotional and informational support in the real-world, although individuals can obtain a large amount of informational social support conveniently just by one click or post on social networking sites nowadays .