We adapted the adult French version of the Basic Empathy Scale to French children aged 6-11 years, in order to probe the factorial structure underlying empathy. A total of 410 children (189 girls and 221 boys) were instructed to fill out the resulting Basic Empathy Scale in Children (BES-C). Results showed that, as in adulthood, the three-factor model of empathy (i.e., emotional contagion, cogn...

Sir, We thank Gillespie et al. (2014) for their letter. They summarize data that suggest that in autism, vicarious activations can be relatively normal under instructions explicitly encouraging vicarious processes, while being abnormal in conditions in which instructions do not. This points to an important opportunity to improve our understanding of empathy—both with regards to deficits in pati...

BACKGROUND Although appropriate empathy in health professionals is essential, a loss of empathy can occur during medical education. The structure of clinical learning may be one factor that is implicated in a loss of empathy. This study examines student and doctor empathy, and possible associations between empathy and the structure of clinical learning. METHODS There were three groups of part...

Humans continuously assess one another’s situational context, modify their own affective state, and then respond based on these outcomes through empathetic expression. Virtual agents should be capable of similarly empathizing with users in interactive environments. A key challenge posed by empathetic reasoning in virtual agents is determining whether to respond with parallel or reactive empathy...

This paper seeks to give an overview of the role of clinical empathy in therapy and in the physician-patient relationship. Researchers have offered definitions of empathy in the clinical context, and a number of validated measures exist. There is evidence from the health-related research literature to support the positive association of clinical empathy with improved therapeutic outcomes in a w...

Initially thought of as a unitary ability, empathy has been more recently considered to consist of 2 components (i.e., an affective and a cognitive component). The Basic Empathy Scale (BES) is a tool that has been used to assess empathy in young people and adolescents on the basis of this dual-component conception (Jolliffe & Farrington, 2006). Recent studies of empathy have led to it being def...

BACKGROUND Empathy is important in ensuring the quality of the patient-physician relationship. Several studies have concluded that empathy declines during medical training, especially during the third year. However, there is little empirical research on what may influence a medical student's empathy. In addition, studies of empathy in medicine have generally been dominated by quantitative appro...

Because empathic patient interactions by dentists are associated with improved patient outcomes, self-reported declines in empathy during dental student training are a concern. This study examined differences in empathy in 178 dental students at the University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario from years one through four using an anonymous self-report web-based survey in a cross-...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to assess the clinical empathy of a cohort of medical students spanning 4 years of undergraduate study and to identify factors associated with empathy. METHODS A cross-sectional study to assess the empathy of undergraduate medical students at the University College of Medical Sciences and GTB Hospital in Delhi, India, was conducted using the Jefferson Sca...

Previous studies have traced a relationship between the attachment styles of nurses working as in healthcare teams and their empathy which is an essential characteristic required of people concerned with managing relationships, supporting social events, and improving the of nurse-patient relationships. Since determining the effective variables in the quality of nurse-patient relationships in cl...