Abstract
BackgroundEmpathy is an important element of the physician-patient relationship and is a critical personality trait for medical students. However, research has shown that it declines during undergraduate medical education. It is still unclear how empathy interrelates with the psychological elements of medical students, in particular, self-esteem. This study examined the relationship between empathy and self-esteem to explore other possible methods to improve medical students’ empathy.MethodsA stratified sampling strategy was used to select 1690 medical students from 3 medical institutions in Shanghai as study participants. The questionnaires used to collect data included the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy-Student Version (JSPE-S), the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale (RSES), and a self-made inventory on personal information. Descriptive analysis, independent t-test, One-Way ANOVA, and linear regression were used to analyze the data.ResultsThe mean empathy score among medical students was 102.73 with SD = 12.64. Multiple regression analysis revealed that, “age,” “perception of the importance of empathy,” “academic pressure,” “desire to be a doctor after graduation,” and “self-esteem” were significant predictors of empathy (P < 0.05) and the adjusted R2 was 0.462. The correlation matrix between empathy and self-esteem was significant (r = 0.510, P < 0.01). Self-esteem explained 15.5% of the variation of empathy in the final regression model.ConclusionThere was a positive association between self-esteem and empathy. Self-esteem is one of many factors which contribute to medical students’ empathy. Age, academic pressure, attitude toward empathy and future career also play a critical role in medical student empathy. Enhancing medical students’ self-esteem may be an efficacious way to improve medical students’ empathy.
Highlights
Over the past 20 years, the patient-physician relationship has been deteriorating in China (Pan et al, 2015; He and Qian, 2016)
These results suggest that medical students who had a positive attitude toward empathy and future career had higher empathy scores, which echoes a study by Li et al (2018) which found that medical students who did not want to become physicians had lower empathy scores than medical students who were still unsure of their passion to become physicians
This study revealed that there is a positive association between self-esteem and empathy
Summary
Over the past 20 years, the patient-physician relationship has been deteriorating in China (Pan et al, 2015; He and Qian, 2016). Empathy is an essential component of communication skills and has increasingly become a crucial element for establishing positive patient-health provider relationships (Winefield and Chur-Hansen, 2000; Veloski et al, 2005; Loh and Sivalingam, 2008; Hojat et al, 2013). Empathetic physicians experience greater job satisfaction, increased health and well-being, and improved clinical decision making (Kim et al, 2004; West et al, 2006; Hojat et al, 2015). According to Hemmerdinger et al (2007), empathy is a personality trait that enables one to identify with another’s situation, thoughts, or condition by placing oneself in their situation The commonality among these definitions is that empathy is part of a greater psychological domain. Empathy is an important element of the physician-patient relationship and is a critical personality trait for medical students. This study examined the relationship between empathy and self-esteem to explore other possible methods to improve medical students’ empathy
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