Two studies investigated how personand situation-related information elicit empathy and subsequent prosocial behaviour. Results show that congruent information (for example, positive emotion after positive event) elicits more empathy than incongruent information (for example, negative emotion after positive event). The extent of prosocial behaviour was observed to be an additive effect of perso...

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...

BACKGROUND Empathy is a key aspect of the clinical encounter but there is a lack of patient-assessed measures suitable for general clinical settings. OBJECTIVES Our aim was to develop a consultation process measure based on a broad definition of empathy, which is meaningful to patients irrespective of their socio-economic background. METHODS Qualitative and quantitative approaches were used...

The past decades have seen an explosion of studies on empathy in various academic domains including affective neuroscience, psychology, medicine, and economics. However, the volumes of research have almost exclusively focused on its evolutionary origins, development, and neurobiological bases, as well as how the experience of empathy is modulated by social context and interpersonal relationship...

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...

Research supports an “ingroup empathy hypothesis” of higher empathy-related psychophysiological responses towards individuals of the same ethnicity. However, little research has investigated empathy-related responses to non-human targets graded for phylogenetic relatedness. Participants (N = 73) were presented with film stimuli depicting humans, primates, quadruped mammals and birds in victimiz...

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...

OBJECTIVES To critically discuss the need for pharmacists to underpin their consultations with appropriate 'clinical empathy' as part of effective medicines optimisation. METHODS Use of literature around empathy, consultation and pharmacy practice to develop a case for greater clinical empathy in pharmacy consultations. KEY FINDINGS Clinical empathy is defined from the literature and applie...