Abstract
BackgroundWe aimed to assess medical students' empathy and its associations with gender, stage of medical school, quality of life and burnout.MethodA cross-sectional, multi-centric (22 medical schools) study that employed online, validated, self-reported questionnaires on empathy (Interpersonal Reactivity Index), quality of life (The World Health Organization Quality of Life Assessment) and burnout (the Maslach Burnout Inventory) in a random sample of medical students.ResultsOut of a total of 1,650 randomly selected students, 1,350 (81.8%) completed all of the questionnaires. Female students exhibited higher dispositional empathic concern and experienced more personal distress than their male counterparts (p<0.05; d≥0.5). There were minor differences in the empathic dispositions of students in different stages of their medical training (p<0.05; f<0.25). Female students had slightly lower scores for physical and psychological quality of life than male students (p<0.05; d<0.5). Female students scored higher on emotional exhaustion and lower on depersonalization than male students (p<0.001; d<0.5). Students in their final stage of medical school had slightly higher scores for emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and personal accomplishment (p<0.05; f<0.25). Gender (β = 0.27; p<0.001) and perspective taking (β = 0.30; p<0.001) were significant predictors of empathic concern scores. Depersonalization was associated with lower empathic concern (β = −0.18) and perspective taking (β = −0.14) (p<0.001). Personal accomplishment was associated with higher perspective taking (β = 0.21; p<0.001) and lower personal distress (β = −0.26; p<0.001) scores.ConclusionsFemale students had higher empathic concern and personal distress dispositions. The differences in the empathy scores of students in different stages of medical school were small. Among all of the studied variables, personal accomplishment held the most important association with decreasing personal distress and was also a predicting variable for perspective taking.
Highlights
Empathy is an important component of medical professionalism [1,2] and has been frequently associated with improvements in the health outcomes and the quality of care in clinical practice [3,4]
There are cut-off points that suggest the presence of the burnout syndrome for medical professionals [44], we considered MBI
Female students scored higher than their male counterparts in the emotional domains of empathy, but they did not differ in their cognitive scores
Summary
Empathy is an important component of medical professionalism [1,2] and has been frequently associated with improvements in the health outcomes and the quality of care in clinical practice [3,4]. Previous studies demonstrate correlations between empathy, gender [10,11] and personality [12,13,14]. The association of medical students’ empathy and personality traits such as sociability [12,15], openness to experience and agreeableness [13] has been confirmed in studies with different methodological approaches. We aimed to assess medical students’ empathy and its associations with gender, stage of medical school, quality of life and burnout
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
