BACKGROUND This project introduced medicine-related poetry and prose to a Year 3 family medicine clerkship with the purpose of determining students' perception of the usefulness of such materials to enhance empathy, improve patient management, and reduce stress. Although humanities are represented in the curricula of many medical schools, we need more information on how best to incorporate them...

Evidence from psychology indicates that perceived empathy has a host of beneficial effects on attitudes and social behavior. Empathy plays a key role in patient-centered therapy, because it implies the apprehension of another’s inner world and a joint understanding of emotions. This paper is a short survey of main issues relating to empathy that hold relevance to robotics. We focus on the exist...

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...

A key quality index in drug addiction counseling such as Motivational Interviewing is the degree of therapist’s empathy towards the client. Empathy ratings are meant to evaluate the therapist’s understanding of the patient’s feelings, through their sensitivity and care of response. Empathy is also associated with the manifestation of behavioral entrainment in the interaction. In this paper, we ...

Empathy has received increasing empirical attention in the study of intergroup relations. Much of this research has focused on the potential of interventions that generate empathy for improving intergroup attitudes and reducing intergroup bias. Specifically, this work typically explores how empathy mediates the effects of various manipulations, such as direct instructions to imagine how an outg...

BACKGROUND Empathy is important to patient care. The prevailing view is that empathy declines during university medical education. The significance of that decline has been debated.This paper reports the findings in respect of two questions relating to university medical education: 1. Do men and women medical students differ in empathy? 2. Does empathy change amongst men and women over time? ...

We adapted the adult French version of the Basic Empathy Scale to French children aged 6-11 years, in order to probe the factorial structure underlying empathy. A total of 410 children (189 girls and 221 boys) were instructed to fill out the resulting Basic Empathy Scale in Children (BES-C). Results showed that, as in adulthood, the three-factor model of empathy (i.e., emotional contagion, cogn...

Sir, We thank Gillespie et al. (2014) for their letter. They summarize data that suggest that in autism, vicarious activations can be relatively normal under instructions explicitly encouraging vicarious processes, while being abnormal in conditions in which instructions do not. This points to an important opportunity to improve our understanding of empathy—both with regards to deficits in pati...

BACKGROUND Although appropriate empathy in health professionals is essential, a loss of empathy can occur during medical education. The structure of clinical learning may be one factor that is implicated in a loss of empathy. This study examines student and doctor empathy, and possible associations between empathy and the structure of clinical learning. METHODS There were three groups of part...

Humans continuously assess one another’s situational context, modify their own affective state, and then respond based on these outcomes through empathetic expression. Virtual agents should be capable of similarly empathizing with users in interactive environments. A key challenge posed by empathetic reasoning in virtual agents is determining whether to respond with parallel or reactive empathy...