Empathy Trends in American Youth Between 1979 and 2018: An Update

Konrath, S., et al. (2023).

Social Psychological and Personality Science, 0(0).

https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506231218360

Abstract

Previous research has found declining dispositional empathy among American youth from 1979 to 2009. We update these trends until 2018, using three datasets. Study 1 presents a cross-temporal meta-analysis of undergraduates’ empathy (Interpersonal Reactivity Index), finding significant cubic trends over time: perspective taking (PT) and empathic concern (EC) both increased since 2009. Study 2 conceptually replicated these findings using nationally representative datasets, also showing increasing PT (Study 2a: American Freshman Survey) and EC (Study 2b: Monitoring the Future Survey) since 2009. We include economic, interpersonal, and worldview covariates to test for potential explanations, finding evidence that empathy trends may be related to recent changes in interpersonal dynamics.

The article is paywalled here.

Summary:

Shifting trend: Contrary to earlier studies, researchers found that empathy among college students has increased since 2009 in two key dimensions: perspective taking (understanding another's viewpoint) and empathic concern (sharing another's feelings).

Data sources: The study used three datasets: a meta-analysis of college students' self-reported empathy, a nationally representative survey of freshmen (American Freshman Survey), and another national survey of high school students (Monitoring the Future Survey).

Possible explanations: The reasons for the shift are explored, with potential factors including changes in interpersonal dynamics, increased exposure to diverse perspectives through technology, and growing involvement in social movements emphasizing empathy and social justice.

Overall, the research suggests that the story of empathy in American youth may be more nuanced than previously thought. While earlier studies documented a decline, recent data points towards a possible reversal. Understanding the factors influencing empathy trends is crucial for fostering a more compassionate and connected society.

The study highlights the importance of using multiple data sources and different measurement methods to gain a comprehensive understanding of complex social phenomena.  Further research is needed to confirm the trend and explore its causes in more detail.

Colleges want freshmen to use mental health apps. But are they risking students’ privacy?

Deanna Paul
The New York Times
Originally posted 2 Jan 20

Here are two excepts:

TAO Connect is just one of dozens of mental health apps permeating college campuses in recent years. In addition to increasing the bandwidth of college counseling centers, the apps offer information and resources on mental health issues and wellness. But as student demand for mental health services grows, and more colleges turn to digital platforms, experts say universities must begin to consider their role as stewards of sensitive student information and the consequences of encouraging or mandating these technologies.

The rise in student wellness applications arrives as mental health problems among college students have dramatically increased. Three out of 5 U.S. college students experience overwhelming anxiety, and 2 in 5 students reported debilitating depression, according to a 2018 survey from the American College Health Association.

Even so, only about 15 percent of undergraduates seek help at a university counseling center. These apps have begun to fill students’ needs by providing ongoing access to traditional mental health services without barriers such as counselor availability or stigma.

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“If someone wants help, they don’t care how they get that help,” said Lynn E. Linde, chief knowledge and learning officer for the American Counseling Association. “They aren’t looking at whether this person is adequately credentialed and are they protecting my rights. They just want help immediately.”

Yet she worried that students may be giving up more information than they realize and about the level of coercion a school can exert by requiring students to accept terms of service they otherwise wouldn’t agree to.

“Millennials understand that with the use of their apps they’re giving up privacy rights. They don’t think to question it,” Linde said.

The info is here.

Study: College Presidents Prioritizing Student Mental Health

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf
InsideHigherEd.com
Originally posted August 12, 2019

With college students reporting problems with anxiety and depression more than ever before, and suicides now a big problem on campuses, university presidents are responding accordingly.

More than 80 percent of top university executives say that mental health is more of a priority on campus than it was three years ago, according to a new report released today by the American Council on Education.

"Student mental health concerns have escalated over the last 10 years," the report states. "We wanted to know how presidents were responding to this increase. To assess short-term changes, we asked presidents to reflect on the last three years on their campus and whether they have observed an increase, decrease, or no change in how they prioritize mental health."

ACE, which represents more than 1,700 college and university presidents, surveyed more than 400 college and university leaders from two- and four-year public and private institutions. About 78 percent of those surveyed were at four-year universities, and the remainder led two-year institutions.

The association found 29 percent of all the presidents surveyed received reports of students with mental health issues once a week or more. About 42 percent of the presidents reported hearing about these problems at least a few times every month. As a result, presidents have allocated more funding to addressing student mental health problems -- 72 percent of the presidents indicated they had spent more money on mental health initiatives than they did three years ago. One unnamed president even reported spending $15 million on a new “comprehensive student well-being building.”

The info is here.

Campuses Are Short on Mental-Health Counselors. But They’ve Got Plenty of Antidepressants.

Lily Jackson

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally posted June 28, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

A Potential for Lopsided Treatment

It is generally accepted that the most effective treatment for medium-to-severe depression is a mix of therapy and medication. But on most college campuses, it’s easier to get the latter than the former.

A student experiencing symptoms of depression who wants to see a counselor may have to wait weeks. The average wait for a first-time appointment among all college counseling centers is about seven business days, according to a report by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors. And nearly two-thirds of counseling directors whose centers offer psychiatric services say they need “more hours of psychiatric services than they currently have to meet student needs,” according to the same report.

On many campuses, the path to a prescription is simpler. A student can walk into a campus clinic where a medical employee can administer an evaluation called the PHQ-9, a nine-question rubric, commonly used across medicine, that assesses the patient's well-being with questions like, “Have you been feeling blue for the last two weeks?” and “Have you experienced thoughts of suicide?”

Based on the student’s evaluation score, psychologists can direct them toward medication or therapy, or both, based on the severity of their symptoms. Some students are seeking mental health resources with a driving force of “instant relief,” said Gregory Eells, executive director of Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of Pennsylvania and the president-elect of Aucccd.

So they tell their physician what they want, Eells said, rather than inquiring about what they need.

It’s common, experts say, for a patient to leave the first visit with a prescription for an antidepressant.

“Most students come in knowing one thing: They want help,” said William E. Neighbor, clinical professor of family medicine at the University of Washington Hall Health Center. “They are interested in medications because most have friends who have been on them.”

The info is here.

How to Hold Research 'Rock Stars' Accountable for Sexual Harassment

By Sarah Brown
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally posted July 21, 2016

How should professors found responsible for sexual harassment be punished? How can colleges encourage victims -- often graduate students who work closely with their harassers -- to come forward? On Tuesday a panel featuring two scholars, a member of Congress, a university official, and a journalist tackled those questions and others about harassment in the sciences and in academe more broadly.

The panel, which took place at the University of California at San Francisco and was broadcast on Facebook Live, was hosted by Rep. Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, who in January drew attention for taking a stand against sexual harassment in the sciences, in a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The article is here.

Senate Unanimous in Bill Protecting Student Medical Records

By Chris Gray
The Lund Report
Originally posted February 16, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Senate Bill 1558 allows university or college health centers, mental health centers and counseling centers to share patient medical information with someone at the university only if they have the right to access that information off-campus -- a high legal bar.

“Students will have the same expectation of privacy on-campus as off-campus,” said Sen. Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis, the bill’s chief sponsor.

She told The Lund Report that the bill was necessary because campus health records can sometimes be classified as student records under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, and not protected under the more ironclad medical privacy law, the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. And whereas HIPAA medical records come with them a strong guarantee of privacy, FERPA student records can be viewed by university administrators in certain circumstances.

The article is here.

Mental health on college campuses: A look at the numbers

By Sarah Sabatke
USA Today
Originally published January 30, 2016

Approximately 42,773 Americans commit suicide every year, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, many of whom are college students.

The University of Pennsylvania, Tulane University, Appalachian State University and Yale University, among others, made national headlines in recent years after student suicides rocked their campus communities, highlighting a growing need for comprehensive mental healthcare on college campuses.

The page of statistics and infographics is here.

Mental-Health Crunch on Campus

By Melissa Korn and  Angela Chen
The Wall Street Journal
Originally published April 28, 2015

Universities are hiring more social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists as demand for campus mental-health services rises. But persistent budget gaps mean that students in some cases foot much of the cost of the positions.

Students at George Washington University will be charged an additional $1,667 in tuition next year, a jump of 3.4%. More than $830,000 of the resulting new revenue will pay for mental-health services.

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“The demand [by students] so outpaces the supply of appointments that it’s very hard to get a weekly appointment, even for students having pretty serious symptoms that interfere with their academic function,” said Elizabeth Gong-Guy, executive director of counseling and psychological services at UCLA and president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors.

The entire article is here.

What don't students understand about morality?

By David Morrow
The Philosopher's Cocoon
Originally published November 19, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

Here are a few more false beliefs that I suspect many students bring to our intro courses:

1. "Morality is just a matter of opinion," which they take to mean that moral claims are neither true or false. 
2. Morality, like law, must be positivistic—that is, something can be right or wrong only if someone or something says that it's right or wrong. (Thus, "Who's to say what's right or wrong?") 
3. "Morality is just your personal feelings." This is a wishy-washy mix of emotivism and subjectivism. It entails that you're always right about moral claims that apply to yourself, and so obviously conflicts both with (1) and with cultural relativism. 
4. Saying that x is wrong is equivalent to saying that anyone who does x should be punished. (Now, Mill says something like this, but allows that the punishment could be left to one's own conscience. Many students seem to think that "society," in some form or another, should punish the person.)

The entire article is here.

New Ethical And Legal Issues Associated With Cyberbullying On College Campuses

Medical News Today
Originally published July 14, 2013

Cyberbullying in the college environment can pose serious consequences for students' living and learning environments, including physical endangerment, according to newly published research by a UT Arlington associate education professor.

Jiyoon Yoon, director of the Early Childhood - Grade 6 Program for the UT Arlington College of Education and Health Professions, co-authored the paper "Cyberbullying Presence, Extent, and Forms in a Midwestern Post-secondary Institution," * which appears in the June 2013 issue of Information Systems Education Journal.

The researchers found that most respondents considered cyberbullying to be more prevalent at the secondary school level. But respondents said harassment via social media, text message or other electronic communications can be pernicious in the college environment and merited official response from administrators.

The entire story is here.

The research article can be found here.

Gag Orders on Sexuality

By Allie Grasgreen

Inside Higher Ed

Originally posted on May 23, 2013

When Brittney Griner, Baylor University’s star basketball player and one of the most celebrated athletes in the history of the sport, came out publicly as gay last month, she was rather nonchalant about it. She didn’t write a Sports Illustrated cover story – à la professional basketball player Jason Collins, a few weeks later – she just sort of mentioned it in media interviews. Griner is “someone who’s always been open,” she said, with family, friends and teammates.

But, as Griner revealed a few weeks later, she wasn’t allowed to be open as much as she might have liked. That’s because Baylor head coach Kim Mulkey told her and her teammates not to talk publicly about their sexuality.

“It was a recruiting thing,” Griner told ESPN. “The coaches thought that if it seemed like they condoned it, people wouldn’t let their kids come play for Baylor.”

Griner's account followed on the heels of speculation that her coming out signaled a new age at Baylor – a private Christian university whose nondiscrimination policy does not cover sexual orientation and whose student handbook entry for “sexual misconduct” includes as examples of inappropriate actions "homosexual behavior" and participation in “advocacy groups which promote understanding of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.”

Read more here.

College admission questions rarely identify criminal behavior

University of Colorado
Press Release
April 16, 2013

A new study shows that neither criminal background checks nor pre-admission screening questions accurately predict students likely to commit crime on college campuses.

"In an effort to reduce campus crime, more than half of all American colleges ask applicants about their criminal histories or require criminal background checks," said study author Carol Runyan , Ph.D., MPH, and professor of epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health. "But there is no real evidence to show this reduces campus crime."

Colleges across the U.S. ramped up background checks after the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre which killed 32 people and wounded another 17.

Yet Runyan found that only 3.3 percent of college seniors who engaged in misconduct actually reported precollege criminal histories during the admissions process. And just 8.5 percent of applicants with a criminal history were charged with misconduct during college.

The study surveyed 6,972 students at a large southern university. It found that students with criminal records prior to college were more likely to commit crimes once admitted but the screening process rarely identified them.

"We didn't look at cheating or minor alcohol offences," Runyan said. "We focused on significant offences like assault, robbery, property crimes, driving under the influence of alcohol, marijuana use and other drug-related crimes."

While colleges are generally safe environments, students can be both perpetrators and victims of crimes that pose risks to the entire campus community, Runyan said.

She noted that earlier studies had reported that up to 14 percent of all college men admitted to some kind of sexual assault or coercion while 30 percent of university males and 22 percent of females said they had driven under the influence of alcohol in the last year. Also, 19 percent of students reported illicit drug use.

Still, the screening questions have proven a weak tool in identifying would-be campus criminals, Runyan said.

Runyan's findings indicate that students who engage in criminal activity during college are more likely to have engaged in misconduct prior to college, whether they admit it on their applications or not. However, she said current screening questions on the college application often fail to detect which students will engage in misconduct during college. And most of those who have records before college don't seem to continue the behaviors in college.

Even if the screenings could identify likely troublemakers, Runyan said, colleges would have to decide whether to admit the students given that the odds of them committing a crime on campus would still be low. And much of the reported precollege crime involves marijuana use and is not violent.

Another complication is possible discrimination. Students from more affluent backgrounds, who tend to be white, can often pay to have their early criminal records expunged while others, including many minorities, can't afford it.

"Based on our work, I cannot say with confidence that colleges should stop asking about criminal backgrounds, but I would use caution in thinking that this is the best strategy to address crime on campus," said Runyan who directs the University of Colorado's Pediatric Injury Prevention, Education and Research Program. "We need to ensure a safe and supportive environment for all students rather than limiting college access for students who may need extra help."

The study was recently published in the journal Injury Prevention and will be presented by Runyan at a conference in June.

Anxiety, Depression, Relationships

By Allie Grasgreen
Inside Higher Ed
Originally published April 12, 2013

The findings of this year’s survey of college counseling directors about the state of their students and the centers where they treat them look a whole lot like last year’s (in some ways good, in some ways bad).

The percentage of students seeking help for various problems continues to creep up in many areas, and nearly all respondents to the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors’ annual survey said the number of students with “significant psychological problems” is a growing concern for them. Also still on the slow but (mostly) steady rise are counseling centers’ budgets and staffing levels.

Four hundred directors -- about half the association’s membership -- completed the survey during the 2011-12 academic year. Together, they account for 319,634 students who sought mental health services during that time. The colleges are about split between public and private, mostly four-year, and vary in size and location.

About two-thirds of directors also said they perceived an increase last year in the number of students coming in with “severe psychological problems” (21 percent of students overall) and already taking psychotropic medications (24 percent of students).


Directors also, as has been the case in the past, are unsure whether those students’ needs are being met. About six in 10 directors have psychological services available on their campuses, but 19 percent say what’s available is inadequate.

The entire story is here.

Students Rate Mental Health Services

By Allie Grasgreen
Inside Higher Ed
Originally published October 30, 2012


More than 62 percent of students who withdrew from college with mental health problems did so for that reason, a new national survey shows.

The survey, released today by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, aims to gauge, based on student perceptions, whether colleges are meeting students' mental health needs and how they can better support those students' academic experience. The results are mixed.

From August to November 2011, the NAMI surveyed 765 people diagnosed with a mental health condition who are currently enrolled in college (68 percent were) or were enrolled within the past five years. The vast majority -- 71 percent -- attended public or private four-year colleges, while 19 percent attended community colleges (the others were online, trade or technical and specialty colleges). Eighty-two percent of respondents were white and the same percentage were female (women are much more likely than men to seek counseling on campus), and more than 60 percent were between the ages of 18 and 27 (with 37 percent in the traditional college ages of 18-22). Nearly eight in 10 identified as straight.

Consistent with other national surveys, depression is one of the most common problems for students, with 27 percent reporting it as their primary diagnosis.

Read more here.