Abstract
Optimism and self-efficacy have been associated with psychological health. Empathy has also been found to have a unique role in community health volunteering and promote positive functioning. This study investigated whether self-efficacy and optimism were associated with psychological health in terms of psychological and subjective well-being in healthcare volunteers. It also investigated whether empathy added to the explanation of psychological health, over and above that accounted for by self-efficacy and optimism. A convenience sample of 160 Italian clown doctors volunteering in various hospitals completed self-report measures of self-efficacy, optimism, empathy, psychological well-being, and subjective well-being. Results of hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicated that self-efficacy and optimism were associated with both outcomes and that aspects of empathy, such as others’ perspective taking and personal distress for others’ difficulties, added to the explanation of psychological health with opposite effects. The present study adds to previous research on the role of self-efficacy, optimism, and empathy for community health volunteers’ psychological health. It also offers suggestions regarding the training for this type of volunteer.
Highlights
Volunteering is an intentional, proactive helping behavior aimed at enhancing social capital, strengthening the community, and delivering services that otherwise would have costs or be underprovided [1,2].In the last three decades, many volunteers have approached the clown activity in healthcare settings since it was found to humanize healthcare and promote patients’ good health [3,4]
This study aimed to test whether self-efficacy and optimism were positively associated with volunteer clown doctors’ psychological health and whether empathy explained some incremental variance of this outcome
This study aimed to test whether self-efficacy and optimism were associated with psychological and subjective well-being among volunteer clown doctors since they were found to be related to other populations’ psychological health [34,35,36,37,38,39,40]
Summary
Volunteering is an intentional, proactive helping behavior aimed at enhancing social capital, strengthening the community, and delivering services that otherwise would have costs or be underprovided [1,2]. In the last three decades, many volunteers have approached the clown activity in healthcare settings since it was found to humanize healthcare and promote patients’ good health [3,4]. Evidence exists that volunteering may promote the volunteers’ benefits in terms of physical, social, and psychological health [9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. Most studies have focused only on the beneficial effects of engaging in volunteering, whereas individual characteristics that may contribute to volunteers’ psychological health have not been thoroughly investigated. We committed to filling this gap in the literature by examining whether some factors associated with positive mental functioning of other populations may play the same role in healthcare volunteers like clown doctors
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