Ninety-nine 2-year-olds, out of a larger sample of 474 children, were classified as high (n = 49) or low (n = 50) in externalizing (aggressive/destructive) behaviors based on maternal reports assessed twice across a 2-month period. During a laboratory assessment, these toddlers participated in two empathy-eliciting tasks, from which affective, behavioral, and physiological measures were derived...

This study examined whether trait empathy is related to hypnotic ability and absorption. Sixty-four graduate students and mental health professionals completed the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form A; the Davis Interpersonal Reactivity Index; and the Tellegen Absorption Scale as measures of hypnotic ability, empathy, and absorption. Correlation analysis determined that statis...

In this essay, we focus on empathy in children and adolescents with disruptive behavior disorders (DBD), based on the assumption that lack of empathy is a risk factor for the development of DBD. We reflect on the heterogeneity of DBD, the complex nature of the empathy construct, discuss empathy's role in aggression, and review recent findings from studies on empathic skills in children and adol...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the association between sick leave prescription and physician burnout and empathy in a primary care health district in Lleida, Spain. METHODS This descriptive study included 108 primary care doctors from 22 primary care centers in Lleida in 2014 (183,600 patients). Burnout was measured with the Maslach Burnout Inventory and empathy with the Jefferson Scale of Physici...

In the last decade, the phenomenon of empathy has received widespread attention by the field of social neuroscience. This has provided fresh insights for theoretical models of empathy, and substantially influenced the academic and public conceptions about this complex social skill. The present paper highlights three key issues which are often linked to empathy, but which at the same time might ...

Deficits in empathy enhance conflicts and human suffering. Thus, it is crucial to understand how empathy can be learned and how learning experiences shape empathy-related processes in the human brain. As a model of empathy deficits, we used the well-established suppression of empathy-related brain responses for the suffering of out-groups and tested whether and how out-group empathy is boosted ...

Empathy is an essential part of normal social functioning, yet there are precious few instruments for measuring individual differences in this domain. In this article we review psychological theories of empathy and its measurement. Previous instruments that purport to measure this have not always focused purely on empathy. We report a new self-report questionnaire, the Empathy Quotient (EQ), fo...

Two alternative models of impaired cognitive and affective processing that may underlie reduced social quality of life (SQoL) of persons with schizophrenia, were examined. According to the parallel process model, impaired cognitive empathy and affective empathy make relatively independent contributions to the symptoms of schizophrenia and to the consequent reduction in SQoL. According to the in...

BACKGROUND Burnout is a growing problem among healthcare professionals and may be mitigated and even prevented by measures designed to promote empathy and resilience. OBJECTIVES We studied the association between burnout and empathy in primary care practitioners in Lleida, Spain and investigated possible differences according to age, sex, profession, and place of practice (urban versus rural)...

Empathy is an important component of human relationships, yet the neural mechanisms that facilitate empathy are unclear. The broad construct of empathy incorporates both cognitive and affective components. Cognitive empathy includes mentalizing skills such as perspective-taking. Affective empathy consists of the affect produced in response to someone else's emotional state, a process which is f...