Kaveon Stewart (left) and Karthik Chandrakantan engage with digital content on their smart devices. Eric Abraira
It starts with a swipe.
A violent clip loops. A child cries in a far-off place. Another breaking headline flashes. The app notices what holds your attention and shows you more, scroll after scroll. At first it stings. Then it becomes background noise. After a while you barely register anything at all.
Some college students describe a steady dulling of emotion after repeated exposure to intense content online. The change is gradual enough that they do not notice it until it becomes a pattern; all culminating with a reflexive reach for the phone and only the faintest reaction when something upsetting appears.
Dr Matthew Baysden, a licensed psychologist and lecturer at the University of North Texas, points to platform design as a major factor.
“We are all a little more desensitized to life,” he said.
He described social media algorithms as functioning like large scale operant conditioning systems that use variable reward schedules and dopaminergic prediction error to shape and maintain user attention. In simpler terms, platforms reward us unpredictably, keeping us hooked much like slot machines.
“It makes real emotions a little less interesting and makes us less empathic to the human experience and more robotic,” he said.
Platforms favor content that grabs attention and holds it. Repeated exposure to high arousal material can shift the balance between reflective response and habitual reaction, functioning much like many other addictions, he noted. What begins as deliberate viewing increasingly becomes cue-driven behavior, almost instinctual. That shift isn’t just theoretical. On campus, students like Karthik Chandrakantan and Kaveon Stewart describe the same patterns in their own lives.
Karthik Chandrakantan, a senior at University of North Texas, is one of many students who feel this heightened sense of desensitization. He sees the engagement system as very give-and-take, depending on how much you engage with the content.
“It’s very helpful to learn about what it’s capable of, but it also has a lot of negative side effects associated with it,” Chandrakantan says, noting the dichotomy of social media and how it acts as a virtual double-edged sword. “It just doesn’t seem like the best rabbit hole to delve into.”
Sitting nearby, Kaveon Stewart nodded in agreement. His own experience echoed that sense of emotional fatigue.
“Sometimes I’ll see something, like, real screwed up and just scroll past it,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t care, but… it’s like I’ve seen too much to react as strongly anymore.”
Their experiences echo what researchers have documented. According to various 2024 peer-reviewed studies regarding social media and its effect on mental health, college students who rely heavily on social networking sites often experience difficulties in emotion regulation. The researchers linked this emotional dependence to unmet psychological needs and repeated exposure to distressing content. This echoes what a portion of students and campus clinicians are seeing: a steady erosion of emotional responsiveness in daily life.
“It’s very helpful to learn about what it’s capable of, but it also has a lot of negative side effects associated with it,” Chandrakantan says, noting the dichotomy of social media and how it acts as a virtual double-edged sword. “It just doesn’t seem like the best rabbit hole to delve into.”
Sitting nearby, Kaveon Stewart nodded in agreement. His own experience echoed that sense of emotional fatigue.
“Sometimes I’ll see something, like, real screwed up and just scroll past it,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t care, but… it’s like I’ve seen too much to react as strongly anymore.”
Their experiences echo what researchers have documented. According to various 2024 peer-reviewed studies regarding social media and its effect on mental health, college students who rely heavily on social networking sites often experience difficulties in emotion regulation. The researchers linked this emotional dependence to unmet psychological needs and repeated exposure to distressing content. This echoes what a portion of students and campus clinicians are seeing: a steady erosion of emotional responsiveness in daily life.
The consequences show up in ordinary moments. These types of students report scrolling through feeds and feeling a sense of dullness where shock or sadness used to be. Some notice it in the classroom when they cannot summon the emotional energy to engage with difficult news stories. Others see it when a friend shares something painful and their initial impulse is to look unphased, having heard it all before.
The studies’ findings mirror what some students say they’ve experienced firsthand. It’s a slow erosion of emotional response that’s hard to notice until it’s already happening.
But the numbness doesn’t stop at the screen. It can bleed into how people treat each other. When reactions get muted, people miss the cues that would normally prompt them to offer help or dig deeper.
The studies’ findings mirror what some students say they’ve experienced firsthand. It’s a slow erosion of emotional response that’s hard to notice until it’s already happening.
But the numbness doesn’t stop at the screen. It can bleed into how people treat each other. When reactions get muted, people miss the cues that would normally prompt them to offer help or dig deeper.
Practical steps commonly recommended by clinicians and campus counselors emphasize boundaries over wholesale abandonment. Students who have regained a stronger sense of emotional clarity describe simple measures that helped: turning off push notifications, curating feeds to reduce sensational content, scheduling deliberate phone free stretches each day, and creating rituals for processing difficult material with peers or mentors. These tactics reduce the frequency and intensity of exposure and restore opportunities for reflective engagement.
For students like Chandrakantan and Stewart, quick scrolling breaks can feel harmless, especially during midterms and finals. Counselors warn those breaks may reinforce the same automatic patterns they described, paralleling discoveries from other studies that linked social media use to worsening mental health outcomes.
That does not mean empathy is gone.
As Baysden put it, “Empathy does not go away, but it needs space to grow.”
Eric Abraira is a Journalism student at the University of North Texas with interests in video game journalism and voice acting. He is developing skills in clear, accessible storytelling and deadline‑driven reporting, while using journalism as a pathway into the broader media industry. Abraira will graduate with his Bachelor of Arts in Journalism in May of 2027 and aspires to pursue a career in voice acting, bringing authentic and engaging performances to audiences.
