Introduction. Compassion fatigue is a concept used with increasing frequency in the nursing literature. The objective of this paper is to identify common themes across the literature and to apply these themes, and an existing model of compassion fatigue, to informal caregivers for family members with dementia. Findings. Caregivers for family members with dementia may be at risk for developing c...

We examined the relationship between self-compassion and hopelessness depression. The participants were 418 students at a technology college in Hunan, China, who completed questionnaires to measure self-compassion, hopelessness depression, and negative cognitive style. The results showed that self-compassion was negatively associated with both hopelessness depression and negative cognitive styl...

BACKGROUND Previous cross-sectional studies suggest that self-compassion and depressive symptoms are consistently negatively associated. Although it is often implicitly assumed that (a lack of) self-compassion precedes depressive symptoms, so far no study has tested whether (lack of) self-compassion is a cause or a consequence of depressive symptoms, or both. METHOD To examine such reciprocal...

this paper represents a commentary to marianna fotaki’s editorial: ‘why and how is compassion necessary to provide good quality healthcare?’ within this commentary, i discuss some of the issues raised by marianna fotaki, and conclude that we should work towards an organizational culture which considers the important concept of compassion by focusing on the well-being and teamwork of all involved.

BACKGROUND Studies have investigated burnout and compassion fatigue among nurses and effects in the nursing profession. However, there are limited investigations of burnout and compassion fatigue among undergraduate nursing students in South Africa, as nursing students may experience distressful situations during their nursing education course, which may have an impact during their training and...

PURPOSE This study was conducted to develop a program to help emergency nurses overcome compassion fatigue, and to analyze the effects of the program. METHODS A nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest design was used. There were 14 participants in the experimental group and 18 subjects in the control group. The program was comprised of five, weekly 80-minute sessions including understand...

Self-compassion, or the ability to kindly accept oneself while suffering, is a topic of significant and growing scientific interest. Past research has shown, for example, that self-compassion is associated with less concurrent depression. So far, however, it remained untested whether self-compassion also prospectively predicts depression symptoms. Three hundred and forty-seven first-year psycho...

Compassion is a key motivator of altruistic behavior, but little is known about individuals' capacity to cultivate compassion through training. We examined whether compassion may be systematically trained by testing whether (a) short-term compassion training increases altruistic behavior and (b) individual differences in altruism are associated with training-induced changes in neural responses ...

Compassion is an affective response to another's suffering and a catalyst of prosocial behavior. In the present studies, we explore the peripheral physiological changes associated with the experience of compassion. Guided by long-standing theoretical claims, we propose that compassion is associated with activation in the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system through the vagus nerve. Across 4...

OBJECTIVE Physicians are expected to be compassionate. However, most compassion research focuses on compassion fatigue--an outcome variable--rather than examining the specific factors that may interfere with compassion in a physician's practice. This report describes the development and early psychometric data for a self-report questionnaire assessing barriers to compassion among physicians. ...