Abstract
ABSTRACT Nurses and actors both require the ability to demonstrate empathy in their practice. Mastering communication skills and techniques can inform an empathetic response. This skill is particularly important for nurses working in paediatric palliative and end of life care but there is lack of consensus whether empathy can be taught. The process an actor follows when getting into character incorporates drawing on personal emotive experiences and necessitates being receptive to others on stage in order to ‘journey’ from listening and empathising to actually being a character. We have translated this practice into the way we teach nursing students to communicate empathy.
Highlights
The ability to demonstrate empathy is essential to the practice of both nurses and actors yet portraying empathy may not equate with ‘feeling’ empathetic
Reynolds (2017) states that empathy is integral aspect of all helping relationships, of which nursing is, and scholars have over the years tried to understand this phenomenon and how it develops in humans
This paper demonstrates that scenes developed by and performed by drama students studying Applied Theatre can be used to explore how to demonstrate empathy in practice to nursing students in the specific context of palliative and end of life care for children and young people
Summary
The ability to demonstrate empathy is essential to the practice of both nurses and actors yet portraying empathy may not equate with ‘feeling’ empathetic. Batson (2009) describes five rationales for how the thoughts and feelings of another person can be known. These include projection into the context the observed is experiencing and imagining how they are feeling; the action either singular or collective rationale. Current neuroscientific research around the affective and cognitive components of empathy whilst bringing new insights into how we understand and share emotional responses, demonstrates the need for further neuroimaging research into types and forms of empathy and their inter-relation (Batson, Lishner and Stocks 2015; Ferrari and Coudé 2018). Whilst motivation to help someone arising from witnessing their distress was once perceived egoistic (aiming to relieve the impact of witnessing distress), an altruistic motivation for empathy is accepted when recognising associated negatives, such as altruistic behaviour resulting in injury, or even death (Batson, Lishner and Stocks 2015).
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