A key question in research on empathy is what interpersonal motivations might be activated by empathy. Does empathy promote only a concern with other's outcomes ("altruism"), as well as decreased concern with one's own outcomes ("selflessness"), or an increased concern with equality in outcomes ("egalitarianism")? These interpersonal motivations were assessed with a series of experimental games...

Background and Objectives: Studies investigating life skills and general health have mainly focused on some skills or parts of health. In this study, ten components of skills and three components of general health were examined in patients presenting to veterans’ health and counseling centers in Tehran and the relationship between each skill and multiple levels of general health was assessed. ...

CONTEXT Empathy is a major component of a satisfactory doctor-patient relationship and the cultivation of empathy is a learning objective proposed by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) for all American medical schools. Therefore, it is important to address the measurement of empathy, its development and its correlates in medical schools. OBJECTIVES We designed this study to t...

OBJECTIVES Studies have found that empathy is important in moral development and violence suppression, and emotion also affects empathy. However, the combinatorial effect of emotion and empathy on the processing of conflicts is not known. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 44 undergraduate students (23 in low-empathy group and 21 in high-empathy group) were enrolled in this study. They were sub...

OBJECTIVE This study explored the empathy profile of students across five years of medical training. In addition the study examined whether the Jefferson Scale for Physician Empathy correlated with a measure of cognitive empathy, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test and a measure of affective empathy, the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire. METHODS The study was a comparative cross-sectional desi...

Communicating bad news, otherwise known as difficult conversations, is a complex communication skill that requires didactic learning and practical application. Students learn that what may be interpreted as bad news is determined by the recipient and not by the person who is delivering the news. Learning a systematic approach, such as the SPIKES (Setting, Perception, Invitation, Knowledge, Empa...

At theNew Managers’ 2000 Conference, Beth Barrow of Nortel Networks introduced all of us to the challenge of becoming better people managers. She pointed out that in a recent informal survey she conducted of new managers, everyone agreed that only 35% of the skills we learn as senior writers and editors in information development still apply when we become managers. That leaves 65% for new lear...

The understanding of empathy from a neuroscientific perspective has recently developed quickly, with numerous functional MRI studies associating different brain regions with different components of empathy. A recent meta-analysis across 40 fMRI studies revealed that affective empathy is most often associated with increased activity in the insula, whereas cognitive empathy is most often associat...

Empathy allows us to simulate others' affective and cognitive mental states internally, and it has been proposed that the mirroring or motor representation systems play a key role in such simulation. As emotions are related to important adaptive events linked with benefit or danger, simulating others' emotional states might constitute of a special case of empathy. In this functional magnetic re...

Empathy is critical to the quality of our relationships with others and plays an important role in life satisfaction and well-being. The scientific investigation of empathy has focused on characterizing its cognitive and neural substrates, and has pointed to the importance of a network of brain regions involved in emotional experience and perspective taking (e.g., ventromedial prefrontal cortex...