Articles: empathy.
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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. ⋯ Specifically, neural activity in the IFG, SRC, and STS were related to cognitive empathy. Activity in the precentral gyrus was related to affective empathy. The findings suggest that both simulation and mentalizing networks contribute to multiple components of empathy.
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Physicians' empathy is generally regarded as important and attempts are made to foster empathy. However, research indicates that the medical students' empathy is often stunted during medical education, and our understanding of how empathy is modulated during medical education is limited. This critical review explores some relatively-neglected challenges in the literature on empathy development in medical education. ⋯ This may contribute to sustain a double-blinded, dichotomized clinical gaze--a clinical gaze that tends to separate biomedical aspects from human experience and understanding and to neglect existential aspects of both the physician and the patient. Empathy training and the humanities should not be situated outside the hard core of medicine, but rather foster critical discussions of the limits and strengths of biomedical paradigms throughout medicine. In this way, the gap between biomedicine and the humanities could be bridged, and empathy training could contribute both in developing physicians' general clinical perception and judgement and in preventing the widespread stunting of empathy.
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Teaching effectiveness is an important criterion for promoting clinician-educators. However, the relationship between residents' psychological characteristics and their assessments of faculty physicians is unknown. ⋯ This study demonstrates that residents' well-being does not influence their assessments of faculty physicians, thus supporting the trustworthiness of these assessments as a criterion for promoting clinician-educators. However, the association between residents' empathy and resident-of-faculty assessments suggests that faculty assessments may be modestly influenced by residents' intrinsic characteristics.
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The concept of caring is central to the practice of nursing. Recent focus on patient-centred care highlights the importance of viewing caring from the patient's perspective. A comparative descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted to determine if there was a difference in oncology patients' and nurses' perceptions of caring. ⋯ This paper reports on a subset of 19 patients and 15 nurses from the oncology unit. There were significant differences between patients' and nurses' perceptions on overall caring and on several individual behaviours. In order to provide true patient-centred care, innovative approaches to addressing these differences are needed.
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Empathy is one of the fundamental factors in patient care that is beneficial to both patient and physician. ⋯ Results support the construct and criterion-related validities and reliability of the Persian version of the JSPE. Score difference between Iranian and American samples may not reflect a genuine difference in empathy trait and can be explained by cultural factors.