Objectives To examine if the empathy levels of first-year medical students are amenable to didactic interventions idealized to promote values inherent to medical professional identity. Methods This is a pretest-posttest study designed to assess the empathy levels of first-year medical students (n=166) comprising two consecutive classes of a Brazilian medical school, performed before and after...

Social cognition is important in everyday-life social interactions. The social cognitive effects of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, 'ecstasy') and methylphenidate (both used for neuroenhancement and as party drugs) are largely unknown. We investigated the acute effects of MDMA (75 mg), methylphenidate (40 mg) and placebo using the Facial Emotion Recognition Task, Multifaceted Empathy T...

INTRODUCTION Empathy, an essential component of the physician-patient relationship, may be linked to positive patient outcomes. This study aimed to determine the empathy score among student residence assistants (RAs). METHODS In this descriptive design (cross-sectional study), 102 Iranian RAs participated in the study during 2015, completing the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSPE). Data collect...

BACKGROUND Although a large number of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated the neural bases of empathy, little is known about its spatiotemporal dynamics or its modulation by the level of friendship between the observer and the agent who is being hurt. Moreover, most of the previous studies on empathy have focused on empathy for pain rather than empathy for pos...

Research has shown that a factor in a victim's forgiveness of an offender is the victim's ability to make more positive, or at least less negative, attributions of the offender's behavior and that perspective-taking can be a factor in facilitating that process. Self-enhancing humor has been found to be positively correlated with perspective-taking empathy and aggressive humor found to be negati...

Background The concepts of empathy and burnout are critical for practicing paramedics and the profession. While there has been an increasing body of research on the relationship between empathy and burnout with physicians and nurses, surprisingly, no research has been undertaken with paramedics. The aim of this scoping review was to explore the relationship between empathy and burnout. Method...

OBJECTIVE This study explored and compared medical students' attitudes toward communication skills and empathic tendency before and after communication skills training. METHODS Fifty-nine first-year students voluntarily completed a questionnaire consisting of the Communication Skills Attitudes Scale and the Empathic Tendency Scale before and after training. K-means cluster analysis and Studen...

Impairment in empathy has been demonstrated in patients with schizophrenia and individuals with psychosis proneness. In the present study, we examined the neural correlates underlying theory of mind (ToM) and empathy and the relationships between these two social cognitive abilities with schizotypy. Fifty-six first-year college students (31 males, 25 females) between 17 and 21 years of age (M =...