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. ...

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.

AIMS To test a hypothetical path model evaluating the influence of type D personality on job stress and job satisfaction and to identify the mediating effects of compassion fatigue, burnout, and compassion satisfaction among clinical nurses in South Korea. BACKGROUND Personalities susceptible to stress, compassion fatigue, and burnout in clinical nurses have negative effects on the job stress...

Compassion shown towards victims often decreases as the number of individuals in need of aid increases, identifiability of the victims decreases, and the proportion of victims helped shrinks. Such “compassion fade” may hamper individual-level and collective responses to pressing large-scale crises. To date, research on compassion fade has focused on humanitarian challenges; thus, it remains unk...

In this paper, I will explore ideas advanced by Bradshaw, Pence and others who have written on compassion in healthcare. I will attempt to see how and whether their assumptions about compassion can be justified, and explore the role compassion should play in a modern healthcare system. I will justify scepticism at the idea of attempting to incentivise compassion through metrics. The Francis Rep...

Compassion is a word that conveys a sense of action taking place in response to suffering or distress. Over recent years we have seen considerable international debate surrounding compassion within healthcare practice. However, the topic of compassion has been little discussed in terms of the production of health services research. This paper seeks to address this gap by raising compassion with...