Articles: empathy.
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To determine whether vicarious empathy (i.e., to have a visceral empathic response, versus role-playing empathy) decreases, and whether students choosing specialties with greater patient contact maintain vicarious empathy better than do students choosing specialties with less patient contact. ⋯ The findings suggest that undergraduate medical education may be a major determinant differentially affecting the vicarious empathy of students on the basis of gender and/or specialty choice. The greatest impact occurred in men who chose noncore specialties. The significant decrease in vicarious empathy is of concern, because empathy is crucial for a successful physician-patient relationship.
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Little is known about how a child's experience of pain affects his or her parents. Using a vignette methodology, this study investigated the emotional responses of parents who were asked to imagine different painful situations that their child might experience. A sample of 650 parents of school children (325 mothers; 325 fathers) read 8 short stories/vignettes about their child, which varied in terms of type of situation (pain vs other stressful situation), intensity (high vs low), and frequency of occurrence (high vs low). The role of individual differences in parental catastrophizing about their child's pain, catastrophizing about their own pain, dispositional empathy, and gender was also investigated. Parents' dispositional empathy was found to have an impact on parental distress and concern for their child. Catastrophizing about their child's pain had a unique contribution to parents' emotional responses to the vignettes describing their child in pain, beyond the influence of other variables. The impact of parental catastrophizing about their child's pain was most pronounced for parental distress, probably reflecting the high threat value that they attribute to their child's pain. The findings are discussed within recent models of empathy and pain, delineating possible relationships with parents' behavioral responses to their child's pain. ⋯ This vignette study found preliminary evidence for the importance of parent characteristics, beyond situational characteristics, in parental emotional responses to their child's pain. The findings provide indications for the processes implied in parental helping behavior.
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This paper is a report of a concept analysis of empathy. ⋯ While the empathetic response of care providers plays a central role in the recognition and treatment of pain, nurses are taught that regulation of this response is important to protect themselves against the traumatic effects of seeing patients in pain. However, there is emerging evidence that some elements of empathetic arousal are autonomic and therefore unable to be fully controlled; this may have important implications for nurses' vulnerability.
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The author of this response to Dr. Kathryn Gramling's research on the art of nursing as perceived by patients agrees with patient Justine's assessment of the art. ⋯ Justine saw all her nurses, even the brusque one, as performing in a caring way, each according to his/her own personality. The author believes this definition of the art of nursing is valid.
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Our recent event-related brain potential (ERP) study disentangled the neural mechanisms of empathy for pain into an early automatic emotional sharing component and a late controlled cognitive evaluation process. The current study further investigated gender difference in the neural mechanisms underlying empathy for pain by comparing ERPs associated with empathic responses between male and female adults. ⋯ However, females were different from males in that the long-latency empathic response showed stronger modulation by task demands and that the ERP amplitudes at 140-180 ms were correlated with subjective reports of the degree of perceived pain of others and of unpleasantness of the self. Our ERP results provide neuroscience evidence for differences in both the early and late components of empathic process between the two sexes.