A study from the University of Southern California suggests that watching rapid streams of news reports on TV and receiving updates from digital media Web sites like Twitter.com could desensitize people as well as warp understandings of morality.

According to a USC press release, the research team, led by Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, focused on understanding the brain's reaction to inspirational emotions like admiration and compassion. For the study, the team looked at the brain scans of 13 volunteers, who were exposed to real-life stories with the intent of inducing "admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical or social pain" in the volunteers.

In the release, Damasio said that admiration "gives us a yardstick for what to reward in a culture, and for what to look for and try to inspire."

"We actually separate the good from the bad in great part thanks to the feeling of admiration," he said. "It's a deep physiological reaction that's very important to define our humanity."

The researchers found that while humans can respond in fractions of seconds to signs of physical pain in others, it took six to eight seconds for them to respond to stories of virtue or social pain. However, these responses lasted longer than the reactions to stories on physical pain.

"For some kinds of thoughts, especially moral decision-making about other people's social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection," said researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

Manuel Castells, a USC Annenberg media scholar, said the study has "extraordinary implications for the human perceptions of events in a digital communication environment."

"Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention," he said.

The researchers said they are concerned that fast-paced digital media tools, like Twitter, a social networking Web site that allows users to post 140-word status updates, might have an emotional cost on the brain. According to the study, news snippets and constant status updates do not allow time for the brain to process the stories before it is exposed to the next bulletin or update.

"If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality," Immordino-Yang said.

At K-State, students who use or know about Twitter and other similar tools are divided in their support for the Web site. While some said they think it is a waste of time and resources, there are other students who see it as a harmless social networking tool.

Rachelle Burch, junior in marketing, has a Twitter account but says she rarely uses it, preferring other social media outlets.

"People can lose their sense of reality when their life is constantly about what their update is," she said.

Ashton Archer, freshman in mechanical engineering and political science, is also critical of Twitter and the practice of updating online statuses.

"[Twitter] is people wanting everyone to know exactly what they're doing every second of every day," she said.

Archer said the USC research makes sense.

"When presented with too much information, you're just going to scan it and not comprehend it," she said, likening being overexposed to people's lives via Twitter updates to being overexposed to stories on war, causing desensitization.

Caleb Greinke, freshman in history, said he does not think rapid updates on Facebook.com or Twitter are necessarily a bad thing.

"They're a good conduit for alerting friends into what they're thinking and what is happening in their lives," he said. "The main point being, that [Twitter] is better than nothing when everyone's so busy."

However, USC researchers said they are less concerned with online social spaces than fast-paced news updates.

Castells said fast-moving television is more problematic because violence and suffering become an endless show that allows indifference to gradually set in. Damasio seconded this worry.

"What I'm more worried about is what is happening in the (abrupt) juxtapositions that you find, for example, in the news," he said. "When it comes to emotion, because these systems are inherently slow, perhaps all we can say is, not so fast."

Their study, "Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion," was published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.