Relationship between affective state and empathy in medical and psychology students

Abstract

<p><b>Objective:</b> Stress, affective distress (e.g., anxiety & depression symptoms) and burnout, which are commonly experienced by health sciences students and clinicians, are reported to impair empathy. However, few prior studies have examined them in regards to empathy despite its importance to clinical practice. Thus, we examined the relationship between stress, affective distress (i.e., anxiety, depression), components of burnout (i.e., emotional exhaustion, cynicism, low professional efficacy), and empathy in medical and psychology students and compared empathy and its predictors in the two student groups. Further, the putative mechanism underpinning empathy – interoceptive sensibility (IS; i.e., extent of awareness of bodily sensations) – was also examined in regards to empathy.</p><p><b>Methods:</b> Medical (<i>N</i> = 80) and psychology (<i>N</i> = 213) students, including 206 females (70.3%) and 85 males, completed an online questionnaire that asked about empathy, stress, affective distress, burnout and IS. Multiple regression analyses identified which factors were related to global empathy (GE, i.e., total score), emotional empathy (EE), and cognitive empathy (CE).</p><p><b>Results:</b> As a whole, the students reported average empathy levels as follows: EE (<i>M</i> = 13.49, <i>SD</i> = 3.92), CE (<i>M</i> = 16.32, <i>SD</i> = 5.11), and GE total score (<i>M</i> = 44.95, <i>SD</i> = 11.5). In the full sample, after controlling for gender, degree type and Autism Spectrum Quotient score, low GE and CE were associated with low professional efficacy, and low EE was related to high cynicism and low emotional exhaustion. A similar profile of results was obtained in psychology students except that low GE was also associated with low anxiety and high autonomic nervous system (ANS)- reactivity, low EE was related to low professional efficacy (but unrelated to emotional-exhaustion and low CE was related to low anxiety. No difference in GE, EE and CE were detected between psychology and medical students.</p><p><b>Conclusion:</b> Results suggest that the qualities which reduce the potential for good quality communication (i.e., cynicism, autistic traits) may compromise empathy. However, hyper-arousal states (e.g., anxiety, emotional-exhaustion) may not necessarily impair empathy unless a person excessively focuses on their autonomic arousal sensations.</p>