Empathic Qualities Research Articles

Oltre l’empatia: sperimentare nuove forme di coinvolgimento con il mondo

Talking about empathy today is not easy. the word seems to get lost in a sky fool of good intentions, the utopia of a better world, and all-purpose sayings. Empathy has become a key word of our time and resonates more and more often in the crisis situations that relentlessly plague our societies. My work on empathy has been nurtured by the conviction that the importance of this human capacity in the contemporary world stems from the fact that it is not the solution, as many think, but the problem. I therefore proposed a new paradigm, that of empathies, which considers the multiplicity of concrete experiences, lived in changing contexts, of contact with people, objects, non-human beings. There are many forms of individual and collective experience that have an empathic quality. At the same time, they go beyond, as they intersect with other levels and planes of experience which produce ever tighter links between justice, equality, vulnerability of human bodies and of the natural environment. This means being open to the richness of reality. Empathy is a capacity with which we are all endowed, but it is developed and practiced in very different ways, depending on the individual and, in particular, on the social, cultural situation in which each of us lives. Not only that: in the empathic experience, time, the duration of an encounter count, and similarly the space, the architecture of a place.

The influence of active listening on parents’ perceptions of clinical empathy in a stuttering assessment: A preliminary study

PurposeThe primary purpose of this preliminary study was to explore whether a clinician's use of active listening skills (i.e., client-directed eye gaze and paraphrasing) influenced parents’ perceptions of clinical empathy in a stuttering assessment. A secondary purpose was to determine whether parent age, education, or parent concern predicted perceived clinical empathy. MethodParticipants (n = 51 parents/guardians of children who stutter) watched two counter-balanced videos of a clinician demonstrating either high or low frequency use of active listening skills during the clinician's initial assessment with a standardized patient actor portraying a parent of a child who stutters. After each video, parents rated the clinician's empathy and active listening skills via the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy for Observers (JSPEO; Hojat et al., 2017) and the Counselor Activity Self-Efficacy Scales - Modified (Victorino & Hinkle, 2018). Participants then completed a demographic questionnaire and rated their concern about their child's stuttering. ResultsPaired t-tests demonstrated significantly higher ratings of perceived clinical empathy in the high frequency active listening condition compared to the low frequency condition (d = 0.548). Simple linear regression analyses indicated parent age or level of education did not predict perceived clinical empathy. An independent samples t-test indicated that parent concern about stuttering did not predict perceived clinical empathy. ConclusionsPreliminary findings suggest that the clinician was viewed as significantly more understanding, concerned, and caring (i.e., perceived as empathic) when active listening skills were used. Parents’ ratings of empathy on the JSPEO, based on high levels of active listening by the clinician, were not associated with parents’ ages, education levels, or concern about their children's stuttering. This may reflect the value of active listening in clinical relationships regardless of variables specific to the recipient (e.g., parent of a child who stutters). Given that parents are more apt to share thoughts and emotions about their child's communication with clinicians who demonstrate empathic qualities, this preliminary study suggests that the use of active listening skills warrant emphasis in clinical training.

Gutting fishy empathies off the Shetland Islands, Scotland

AbstractThis article builds upon Amerindian epistemologies and develops a perspectival ethnography of industrial Northwestern European skilled modes of engaging with wild fish. It explores Amerindian perspectivism as an ethnographic methodology grounded on animic premises: subject or object status are relative and relational, experience is intersubjective; the body is permeable, and its perspectives can be exchanged through tools and mimetic processes. Thus subjectivity is collectively constituted and the fundamental means of knowing, leading to the acknowledgement of subjectivity in others. Documenting a perspectival exchange guided by Shetland fishers trawling for monkfish, the article focuses on some possible dynamics and affective affordances involved in gutting processes. Gutting is physically and emotionally taxing labour that involves brief but intimate encounters with responsive beings that may offer effective resistance, affecting fishers or damaging their own value as catch. It entails the possibility of developing an intimate knowledge of fish anatomy, ecology, and behaviour, as well as potentially awareness of fish suffering and fishiness, an empathic quality. The research reveals how Shetland fishers maintain animic modes of learning and being in their understandings of the body and fish. The ethnography presents first‐hand insights into ‘relations of trust’, which, although widely reported, continue to be dismissed as implausible. These relations and their dynamics are further attested through Shetlands háfwords and other language practices that establish synecdochical relations between fishers and fish, restricting violence and making it endurable. These insights problematize violence, illustrating the social skills of fishing and the political dynamics of predation, suggesting paths towards addressing cruelty.

Conscious Empathic AI in Service

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have achieved human-scale speed and accuracy for classification tasks. Current systems do not need to be conscious to recognize patterns and classify them. However, for AI to advance to the next level, it needs to develop capabilities such as metathinking, creativity, and empathy. We contend that such a paradigm shift is possible through a fundamental change in the state of artificial intelligence toward consciousness, similar to what took place for humans through the process of natural selection and evolution. To that end, we propose that consciousness in AI is an emergent phenomenon that primordially appears when two machines cocreate their own language through which they can recall and communicate their internal state of time-varying symbol manipulation. Because, in our view, consciousness arises from the communication of inner states, it leads to empathy. We then provide a link between the empathic quality of machines and better service outcomes associated with empathic human agents that can also lead to accountability in AI services.

An Innovative Program Using Magic to Provide Early Clinical Experiences for Preclinical Medical Students: Goals, Experiences, and Results of the MagicAid Program.

ObjectiveEffectively training medical students in compassion, communication, and empathy is essential in fostering a holistic approach to patient care. We sought to address this by implementing an early clinical experience service learning program for medical students in the initial years of their medical education.MethodsMedical students at Stony Brook University initiated, designed, and facilitated the volunteer program, which provides students a framework to learn magic therapy and engage with pediatric patients. The program includes an introductory presentation, training course, and organized bedside sessions with patients. To evaluate the program, a sample of participants partook in a focus group, written questionnaire, and/or online survey.ResultsFrom 2015 to 2020, 130 students participated in magic therapy rounds, engaging 1391 patients. Nine themes of student benefit emerged from qualitative analysis, including acquisition of familiarity with the hospital and healthcare team, cultivation of communication skills, contribution to improvement of patient affect, development of empathic qualities and techniques, and improvement in psychological health. Students were very satisfied with their experiences and viewed the activity as helpful for patients, parents, staff, and themselves.ConclusionsThe program engaged students in compassionate patient care within a holistic approach to patient care early in training.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40670-021-01456-y.

SOCIAL INTELLEGINCE OF A TEACHER AS A FACTOR FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PERSON'S ABILITY TO FACILITATE INTERACTION

The article states that facilitation is a phenomenon of interpersonal interaction and communication, which greatly enhances the productivity of teaching or education of the subjects of the educational process because of their harmonious, democratic style of communication and tolerant, empathic qualities of the teacher’s personality. Facilitative communication generates the most positive motives, and such learning motives; it creates positive preconditions not only for a student in such a case he/she has to take a certain conscious position (“And I can do it” or “And I will do it”), but also for a harmonious cognitive activities with the aim to acquire new knowledge, skills, in which there is a pupil’s desire to learn. Facilitators should seem to “provoke” autonomy and create preconditions for the responsible freedom of schoolchildren. These movements would be taken into account when drawing up curricula for teachers, and when formulating learning goals and evaluating learning outcomes, all of which will create the most favorable preconditions for independent and meaningful learning for pupils, enhancing their cognitive sphere of the person, stimulating learning curiosity, which, above all, will actualize the manifestations of solidarity and cooperation, interaction and mutual assistance at the process of educational activity, contributing to the development of the active personal position and self realization of teachers. All this, in turn, facilitates a high level of cognitive functioning of the entire educational paradigm. The components of facilitation were identified. The first component of facilitation is authenticity, “naturalness”, sincerity of the person. Another component of facilitation is congruence. Congruence is understood as authenticity, openness, honesty; we consider this quality as necessary and sufficient condition for effective interpersonal contact and mutual relations (also with empathy and unconditional positive acceptance). It was noted that another important component of facilitative interaction is the acceptance of his/her own personality and the personality of another person, to take care of another person, and, even in the case of acknowledging the shortcomings of another one, to show positive acceptance of that person. When the teacher feels positive, not superficial attitude towards a pupil, despite even some of the negative points that may occur in the educational process, a positive facilitative interaction in this case can take a place. It was proved, that: 1) the explication of social intelligence is possible only in the paradigm of the subject-subject activity, including – facultative one; 2) the amplification of the abilities of social intelligence occurs in the process of interpersonal interaction; 3) taking into account the multidimensional nature of the abilities of social intelligence, it is evident that social intelligence contains a certain complex of capabilities that are clearly coherent with each other, which are rather stable for this or that teacher; 4) the development of this group of abilities is due to the process of socialization of the person, the influence of both internal resources and characterological characteristics of the person, gender differences and the impact of the environment on a facilitative pedagogical interaction. Key words : facilitation , interpersonal interaction , authenticity , “ naturalness ”, sincerity , congruence , social intelligence , capabilities of social intelligence . Accepted: 10.03.2020 Reviewed: 28.03.2020 Published: 03.04.2020 DOI: http://doi.org/10.31108/3.2020.4.1.3

Endowing a Robotic Tutor with Empathic Qualities: Design and Pilot Evaluation

As increasingly more research efforts are geared towards creating robots that can teach and interact with children in educational contexts, it has been speculated that endowing robots with artificial empathy may facilitate learning. In this paper, we provide a background to the concept of empathy, and how it factors into learning. We then present our approach to equipping a robotic tutor with several empathic qualities, describing the technical architecture and its components, a map-reading learning scenario developed for an interactive multitouch table, as well as the pedagogical and empathic strategies devised for the robot. We also describe the results of a pilot study comparing the robotic tutor with these empathic qualities against a version of the tutor without them. The pilot study was performed with 26 school children aged 10–11 at their school. Results revealed that children in the test condition indeed rated the robot as more empathic than children in the control condition. Moreover, we explored several related measures, such as relational status and learning effect, yet no other significant differences were found. We further discuss these results and provide insights into future directions.

Challenging some assumptions about empathy.

In New Zealand little nursing or medical curricula time, if any, is specifically devoted to the enhancement of empathy. If being empathic is important in the context of patient care, it is a quality that is already present in students or is learned by students during their practicum in the company of experienced clinicians. This study aimed to compare self-reported empathy ratings between different groups of medical students and one cohort of nursing students who were either exposed or not exposed to explicit empathy training or learning in clinical settings in the presence of patients. The Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy (JSPE) was completed before and after groups of medical and nursing students had been exposed to various extended periods of practicum. Some medical student cohorts undertook brief empathy training, whereas others had no exposure. The nursing student cohort had no formal, explicit empathy training. Irrespective of profession, length of practicum or exposure to specific empathy training, there were no significant differences in the self-reported JSPE scores across the seven different cohorts of students. Empathy is a quality that is already present in students or is learned by students during their practicum DISCUSSION: If empathy is caught rather than taught, then brief efforts to enhance empathy may be futile. To optimise the inherent empathic qualities of aspirant health professionals, explicit consideration should be given to how empathy is influenced by the practicum experience.

Three Contextual Frameworks for Siblingships

This discussion of Juliet Mitchell's paper "Siblings: Thinking Theory" places her work within the context of three frameworks: nonlinear thinking, disposition, and phallocentrism. The nonlinear dimension of the developmental process demonstrates how the sibling experience is not static, but rather is subject to a natural transmogrification toward new adaptive forms and meanings that occur over the sequential progress of organizational growth. Secondly, dispositional variables tend to be overlooked in their role in how brothers and sisters engage one another, titrate closeness and separateness, and creatively live out their love, admiration, hate, envy, and rivalry with each other. Sensitivities in dispositional leanings, such as special empathic qualities, may even serve to mitigate sibling turbulence. Lastly, the phallocentricity in Western societies privileges an implicitly male perspective that envisions sibling relationships in terms of threatening competitors, as the common linguistic phrase sibling rivalry suggests. This inflection in culture disregards more-expanding qualities in object relationships and aim-giving strategies that are exchanged in sibling play. These variables are not the sole contributors to the sibling experience, but a sampling of influences both from within and outside the child that affect that experience.

Psychometric properties of a Chinese version of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy‐Health Profession Students

Empathy is central to a therapeutic nurse-patient relationship. Valid and reliable Chinese instruments to assess nursing students' empathy are lacking. The aim of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of a Chinese version of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy-Health Profession Students (C-JSE-HPS) among Taiwanese undergraduate nursing students. A convenience sample of 613 Taiwanese nursing students participated in the study. Content validity, construct validity, internal consistency reliability and test-retest reliability were examined. Content validity was confirmed by a content validity index of 0.89. Factor analysis yielded three components of perspective taking, compassionate care and standing in the patient's shoes, explaining 57.14% of total variance. Women scored higher on empathy than men. Also, students who were enrolled in the 4-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) indicated greater empathy degrees than those in the 2-year Registered Nurse to Bachelor of Science in Nursing (RN-to-BSN). Cronbach's alpha coefficient and the test-retest reliability were 0.93 and 0.92 respectively. A C-JSE-HPS demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties to measure empathy of undergraduate nursing students. Educators may use this instrument to assess empathic qualities among students and design effective empathy-oriented nursing curricula to improve the quality of nursing care.

‘Containing the container’: an exploration of the mother–midwife relationship

This paper aims to explore how sensitive care in pregnancy, labour and birth may influence a mother's emotional availability to her newborn infant. At a micro level, using extracts from close clinical observations the paper investigates how anxieties and defences from previous grief and trauma are revisited and reworked particularly during the intense emotional event of labour and birth. The paper highlights the nature of the relationship between mother and midwife and proposes the development of a containing partnership. At a macro level, the evolution of an increasingly empathic and relational quality of midwifery practice as a result of infant mental health training will also be explored.

Supporting adolescents who have a sibling with a life‐threatening illness: An exploratory study

AbstractAims: This research explores issues encountered by adolescents who have a sibling with a life‐threatening illness, and those who work therapeutically with them. Method: Eight semi‐structured, face‐to‐face interviews were conducted with participants who work therapeutically with this client group. Attention was given to the empathic quality of interviews. The interview sample included six females and two males, encompassing a wide demographic area within England and Wales. Five were counsellors and three had other professional trainings. Findings: Data was analysed using grounded theory. Results showed that the provision of family as well as individual therapeutic support for young people would ease stress for families and professionals alike, and that peer support was considered important. Implications for practice: The results of this research suggest that organisations working with families experiencing a life‐threatening illness would benefit from attending to the quality of support offered to their staff, as well as the families they work with.

Business education, aesthetics and the rule of law: cultivating the moral manager

AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to examine the usefulness to business education of aesthetics, literature and the ancient ideal of the rule of law in an increasingly complex global environment. Recent financial scandals have exposed a range of vulnerabilities in the management decision‐making process and, increasingly, big business is searching for ethical answers. It is suggested that there is a need to develop the necessary critical, analytical and empathic qualities of, in particular, the business student in order that future global corporate leaders might also be moral managers.Design/methodology/approachThe abstract yet foundational concept of the rule of law is reworked in order to widen its application to business activities and ensure greater accountability. It is argued that the intellectual sensibilities need to be stimulated beyond the traditional business studies format, looking to various examples from the liberal arts. The paper proposes greater attention to, for example, the classics, as the lessons we can learn from fiction are highly pertinent to modern leadership and corporate conduct in general.FindingsThere is a relatively new literary genre of business books which is inspired by classic and popular works of literature, for example Power Plays: Shakespeare's Lessons in Leadership; however, such books are yet to appear regularly on business school recommended reading lists.Social implicationsThere are compelling reasons for a radical change in management style, one being that the single‐minded pursuit of profit has recently produced an unprecedented global economic crisis. The paper proposes that, by placing a greater emphasis on developing the intellectual and empathic sensibilities, future managers may be able to adopt a more conscionable approach to environmental and wider societal concerns.Originality/valueAgainst the backdrop of an alarmingly amoral and inept set of global management practices, the paper urges a radical return to a classical or liberal arts education for the business student. A re‐imaging of the traditional rule of law also provides the basis for deciding the right course of action; tailored to meet the specific needs of the modern business community.

The Gender Balance of the Teaching Workforce in Scotland: What’s the Problem?

Historically, formal barriers to gender equality in teaching were justified on the grounds that a predominance of women within the profession would be detrimental to the social and emotional development of male pupils, who needed male teachers as role models. Such arguments continue to be voiced in debates about what should be done to tackle the declining proportion of men in the teaching profession in Scotland. The research reported in this paper investigated the nature of the gender balance amongst teachers in Scottish publicly funded schools, undergraduate students’ attitudes to teaching as a career and policy-makers’ and practitioners’ accounts of the underlying reasons for the growing gender imbalance in teaching. Practical suggestions were sought for possible courses of action to ensure greater diversity amongst the teaching workforce. In this paper it is argued that, whilst there is consensus on the need for a teaching workforce which reflects social diversity, recruiting reluctant men into teaching would be counter-productive. Rather, ways have to be found of promoting the positive aspects of teaching to both men and women, and, at a more general level, encouraging men to place greater value on the caring and empathic qualities which are increasingly required in teaching.

What is important in psychiatric inpatient care? Quality of care from the patient's perspective.

The development of quality assurance programs for psychiatric care has increased the interest in quality of care and accountability from the patient's perspective. However, most investigations of patient satisfaction use instruments which rate aspects of care defined and held to be important by professionals and care givers. The aims of this study were 2-fold. To map descriptive characteristics of ideal inpatient psychiatric care through open patient interviews, using a sample of 78 hospitalized patients and, secondly, based on a content analysis of these interviews, to have another sample of 77 hospitalized patients rank the importance of 48 treatment characteristics extracted from the qualitative analysis. Results of the content analysis showed that characteristics of ideal inpatient treatment could be classified in six categories: staff-patient relationship, patient co-influence, treatment content, activities, ward atmosphere and staff competence. Results from the patients' rating of the importance of treatment characteristics showed that patients put the highest emphasis on staff empathic qualities: being caring, interested and understanding, respecting patients, devoting time to patients, and creating a safe treatment environment. The least importance was ascribed to characteristics of the physical environment and daily routines on the ward. It is concluded that in order to secure content validity of investigations of the quality of psychiatric inpatient care from the patient's perspective, effort should be put into including the areas of staff-patient relationships and patient information and co-influence.

The Therapeutic Relationship: Inexperienced Therapists' Affective Preference and Empathic Communication

The subjects of this study are third-year male medical students who rated videotaped male psychiatric patients for likeability before role-playing a `therapeutic' contact with them. Both liked and disliked patients were confronted in the role-play. Each patient said something positive and something negative about himself. The subjects, who are not trained psychotherapists, were instructed to reply to these self-characterizations in a therapeutic manner. Their replies were blindly rated for empathic quality. It was predicted and substantiated (p < 0.02) that subjects would be more empathic in replying to positive than negative self-characterizations of a liked patient, and vice versa for a disliked patient. A restricted range on the empathy ratings qualified these results. Subjects also attributed higher prognostic expectations and more favourable interpersonal skills to their liked than to their disliked patients (p < 0.01).

Measuring response empathy: The development of a multicomponent rating scale.

This article describes the development of and psychometric data on a new approach to the measurement of the empathic quality of counselor behavior. The features of this approach are, first, the division of the empathy construct into a set of components tapping different aspects of empathic behavior; second, greater specification of the construct; and third, focus on the empathic qualities of individual counselor responses. An existing measure, the Lister Empathy Scale, provided the basis for the Response Empathy Rating Scale, which consists of eight components: frame, inference, accuracy, here and now, centrality, words, voice, manner, and impact. Good interrater reliability was found for the whole scale, as well as for all but two of the components. Centrality was the core component, and factor analysis suggested two underlying factors, Depth Expressiveness and Empathic Exploration. Evidence for validity was found in correlations with client ratings of feeling understood; however, these correlations were strongest when ratings were averaged to form larger units, such as episodes or sessions.

The study-skills workshop

Abstract A concern for improving the study skills of individual students led the Student Counselling Service at the University of East Anglia to consider aspects of the learning environment as a whole, and particularly the relationship between faculty and students. From cautious beginnings the development of the study-skills workshop has enabled counsellors, faculty and students to share problems, experience and expertise in a non-threatening context. The work-shop with its emphasis on an experiential approach provides ample opportunity for developing empathic qualities in both students and faculty, and is often a springboard for change, faculty members being persuaded to reassess their teaching and tutorial performance in the light of student concerns and difficulties expressed during workshop sessions.

Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being

It is my thesis in this paper that we should re-examine and re-evaluate that very special way of being with another person which has been called empathic. I believe we tend to give too little consideration to an element which is extremely important both for the understanding of personality dynamics and for effecting changes in personality and behavior. It is one of the most delicate and powerful ways we have of using ourselves. In spite of all that has been said and written on this topic, it is a way of being which is rarely seen in full bloom in a relationship. I will start with my own somewhat faltering history in relation to this topic. Personal Vacillations Very early in my work as a therapist I discovered that simply listening to my client, very attentively, was an important way of being helpful. So when I was in doubt as to what I should do, in some active way, I listened. It seemed surprising to me that such a passive kind of interaction could be so useful. A little later a social worker, who had a background of Rankian training, helped me to learn that the most effective approach was to listen for the feelings, the emotions whose patterns could be discerned through the client's words. I believe she was the one who suggested that the best response was to reflect these feelings back to the client-- reflect becoming in time a word which made me cringe. But at that time it improved my work as therapist, and I was grateful. Then came my transition to a full-time university position where, with the help of students, I was at last able to scrounge equipment for recording our interviews. I cannot exaggerate the excitement of our learnings as we clustered about the machine which enabled us to listen to ourselves, playing over and over some puzzling point at which the interview clearly went wrong, or those moments in which the client moved significantly forward. (I still regard this as the one best way of learning to improve oneself as a therapist.) Among many lessons from these recordings, we came to realize that listening to feelings and reflecting them was a vastly complex process. We discovered that we could pinpoint the therapist response which caused a fruitful flow of significant expression to become superficial and unprofitable. Likewise we were able to spot the remark which turned a client's dull and desultory talk into a focused selfexploration. In such a context of learning it became quite natural to lay more stress upon the content of the therapist response than upon the empathic quality of the listening. To this extent we became heavily conscious of the techniques which the counselor or therapist was using. We became expert in analyzing, in very minute detail, the ebb and flow of the process in each interview, and