College Students Have Too Much Empathy Essay

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Why college students today have less empathy What is empathy? The definition of Empathy is that the experience of understanding another person's condition from their perspective(thefreedictionary.com). When we have empathy, we can place ourselves in other’s situation and understand others’ feeling. Empathy is a very important life skill which make our lives much better. With empathy we understand other’s need and feelings, and we can be good supporters so that we will have happy and warmth realtionship with people that we interact with. Sadly, a data shows that college students today have less empathy. According a study from the University of Michigan, College students today show less empathy toward others compared with college students …show more content…
By using the social media, people lost the opportunity to observe other’s facial expression and their emotional state. What they facing most of the time are the monitors of their phone and computer. According to theory Perception-Action Model of empathy which is proposed by De Waal, “viewing another’s emotional state automatically and unconsciously activates one’s personal associations with that state, causing, in the absence of inhibition, one to react to another’s experience as one would to one’s own” (Preston & de Waal 2002). Facial expression contribute to the development of empathy. When we are viewing other’s Facial expression, we automatically imitate them so we can feel the same way (Hess & Bourgeois 2009; Sato & Yoshikawa 2006). I believe that we have better empathy before computer and social media were widely used. Take a personal example, I was a college student in China 15 years ago when social media were rarely use. Whenever we had spare time, we would like to call out our friend to play and talk