CONTEXT Empathy towards patients is associated with improved health outcomes. However, quantitative studies using self-reported data have not provided an in-depth opportunity to explore the lived experiences of medical students concerning empathy. OBJECTIVES This study was designed to investigate undergraduate medical students' experiences of the phenomenon of empathy during the course of the...

Research on empathy in schizophrenia has relied on dated self-report scales that do not conform to contemporary social neuroscience models of empathy. The current study evaluated the structure and correlates of the recently-developed Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) in schizophrenia. This measure, whose structure and validity was established in healthy individuals, includ...

Dehumanization is endemic in medical practice. This article discusses the psychology of dehumanization resulting from inherent features of medical settings, the doctor-patient relationship, and the deployment of routine clinical practices. First, we identify six major causes of dehumanization in medical settings (deindividuating practices, impaired patient agency, dissimilarity, mechanization, ...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to investigate whether a patient's preference for a doctor's face is associated with better assessments of relational empathy in the patient-doctor relationship after the first clinical consultation. METHODS A total of 110 patients enrolled in a traditional Korean medical clinic participated in the study. Patients' preference for doctors' faces was assesse...

There is now a societal and cultural expectation that doctors and nurses should feel, and display, empathy for their patients. Many commentators argue that medical and nursing students should be taught empathy. Empathy, however, is difficult to define: it is not the same as kindness, as it implies a degree of psychological insight into what the patient is thinking or feeling. Empathy is seen by...

The common factors have a long history in the field of psychotherapy theory, research and practice. To understand the evidence supporting them as important therapeutic elements, the contextual model of psychotherapy is outlined. Then the evidence, primarily from meta-analyses, is presented for particular common factors, including alliance, empathy, expectations, cultural adaptation, and therapi...

Based on the premise that bullies are deficient in empathy or even lack it completely, bullying prevention and intervention programs often include empathy training. These programs are not always as effective as they aim to be, which may be caused by a failure to acknowledge the multidimensional nature of empathy as well as its complex association with involvement in bullying. To provide a clear...

Empathy is a core prerequisite for human social behavior. Relatively, little is known about how empathy is influenced by social stress and its associated neuroendocrine alterations. The current study was designed to test the impact of acute stress on emotional and cognitive empathy. Healthy male participants were exposed to a psychosocial laboratory stressor (trier social stress test, (TSST)) o...

Empathy is a multicomponent function that includes sensorimotor, affective, and cognitive components. Although especially the affective component may implicate interoception and interoceptive awareness, the impact of interoception on empathy has never been evaluated behaviorally or neurophysiologically. Here, we tested how a preceding period of interoceptive awareness impacts and modulates neur...

Recent scholarship suggests that virtual environments can serve as effective proxies in battling implicit stereotypes. However, existing experimental research has rarely examined the effectiveness of virtual simulations of mental illnesses in inducing empathy to combat stereotypical responses. We report results from a 4-condition, between subjects experiment (N = 112), wherein participants were...