This paper seeks to give an overview of the role of clinical empathy in therapy and in the physician-patient relationship. Researchers have offered definitions of empathy in the clinical context, and a number of validated measures exist. There is evidence from the health-related research literature to support the positive association of clinical empathy with improved therapeutic outcomes in a w...

Initially thought of as a unitary ability, empathy has been more recently considered to consist of 2 components (i.e., an affective and a cognitive component). The Basic Empathy Scale (BES) is a tool that has been used to assess empathy in young people and adolescents on the basis of this dual-component conception (Jolliffe & Farrington, 2006). Recent studies of empathy have led to it being def...

BACKGROUND Empathy is important in ensuring the quality of the patient-physician relationship. Several studies have concluded that empathy declines during medical training, especially during the third year. However, there is little empirical research on what may influence a medical student's empathy. In addition, studies of empathy in medicine have generally been dominated by quantitative appro...

Because empathic patient interactions by dentists are associated with improved patient outcomes, self-reported declines in empathy during dental student training are a concern. This study examined differences in empathy in 178 dental students at the University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario from years one through four using an anonymous self-report web-based survey in a cross-...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to assess the clinical empathy of a cohort of medical students spanning 4 years of undergraduate study and to identify factors associated with empathy. METHODS A cross-sectional study to assess the empathy of undergraduate medical students at the University College of Medical Sciences and GTB Hospital in Delhi, India, was conducted using the Jefferson Sca...

Meditation practices aim at modifying the emotions by reducing reactivity to both pleasant and unpleasant emotions (Sperduti et al., 2012; Reva et al., 2014).Meditation also regulates the attention by reducing distractibility and directing focused attention to the object of meditation (Sperduti et al., 2012). In many meditation techniques attention is directed to ongoing experiences without the...

This opinion piece offers a commentary on the four papers that address the theme of the development of self and other understanding with a view to highlighting the important contribution of developmental research to understanding of mechanisms of social cognition. We discuss potential mechanisms linking self-other distinction and empathy, implications for grouping motor, affective and cognitive...

In social neuroscience, empathy is often approached as an individual ability, whereas researchers in anthropology focus on empathy as a dialectic process between agents. In this perspective paper, we argue that to further elucidate the mechanisms underlying the development of empathy, social neuroscience research should draw on insights and methods from anthropology. First, we discuss neuropsyc...

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...

Empathy indicates an emotional rapport, or identification, with another person. It has been introduced as a central focus for ‘sensitivity trainings’ and feedback workshops in professional settings, and the relatively new Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) movement in schools. Empathy is promoted as a hallmark of social relationships that if featured in human interactions will presumably make ...