Empathy, feeling what others feel, is regarded as a special phenomenon that is separate from other emotional experiences. Emotion theories say little about feeling emotions for others and empathy theories say little about how feeling emotions for others relates to normal firsthand emotional experience. Current empathy theories focus on how we feel emotions for others who feel the same thing, bu...

An optimistic learning bias leads people to update their beliefs in response to better-than-expected good news but neglect worse-than-expected bad news. Because evidence suggests that this bias arises from self-concern, we hypothesized that a similar bias may affect beliefs about other people's futures, to the extent that people care about others. Here, we demonstrated the phenomenon of vicario...

Acute health care environments can be stressful settings with clinicians experiencing deleterious effects of burnout and compassion fatigue affecting their mental health. Subsequently, the quality of patient care and outcomes may be threatened if clinicians experience burnout or compassion fatigue. Therefore, the aim of this descriptive, cross-sectional study was to evaluate the prevalence of b...

Compassion has long been regarded as a core part of our humanity by contemplative traditions, and in recent years, it has received growing research interest. Following a recent review of existing conceptualisations, compassion has been defined as consisting of the following five elements: 1) recognising suffering, 2) understanding the universality of suffering in human experience, 3) feeling mo...

Compassion fatigue, also referred to as secondary traumatic stress, is increasingly being acknowledged as a possible consequence of working in any helping and caring profession. Previous research has focused on examining this construct in a variety of health professionals – social workers, counsellors, psychologists and nurses; however, little attention has been paid to this experience in docto...

The terms “apparent agency” and “vicarious liability” sound like nebulous legal theories, but they can land you in court, or at least cost you attorney’s fees if you’re named in a lawsuit. Most physicians realize that they are responsible for the professional actions of their office staff and those who are directly employed by their practice. Many physicians are unaware, however, that they can ...

Reiki and other energy modalities are included in the scope of nursing standards in many states and could address issues of stress, compassion fatigue, and burnout. Nurses are increasingly vulnerable to these conditions; Reiki could assist them in healing themselves and helping others.

BACKGROUND Emergency rescue personnel can be considered a "high risk" occupational group in that they could experience a broad range of health and mental health consequences as a result of work-related exposures to critical incidents. OBJECTIVES This study examined the resilience factors that protect mental health among first responders. METHODS Nine hundred and sixty-one first responders f...