Manifestation Of Empathy Research Articles

Oral communication skills of international medical graduates: Assessing empathy in discourse

We examine a dataset consisting of 11 International Medical Graduates (IMGs) performing an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). Our aim is to address questions about the linguistic realization of empathy in the clinical discourse of IMGs and the extent to which OSCE examiners are sensitive to relevant features of the discourse. We analyse three aspects of the dataset as manifestations of empathy: sequential organization to provide reassurance; responsiveness to the simulated patient's lexical choices for emotionally charged words; and the organization of turn-taking in the interaction. Our analysis suggests that in each of these areas it is possible to identify discourse strategies which realize empathy. These strategies are used by IMGs who are good communicators and not used by poor communicators. Our evidence suggests that of the features we examine, the most salient for the examiner is a greater than normal occurrence of transition pauses. We argue that it is only in the area of the organization of conversation that the problems displayed by some IMGs are due to differences in cultural background, and it is therefore significant that the feature we identify as salient comes from this area.

Empathy and response to distress in children with Down syndrome.

Most studies of empathy have focused on young children, and those who are typically developing. Thus, we know little about the emergence and manifestation of empathy in non-normally developing children. Empathy and response to distress in others were examined in 30 children with Down syndrome, 22 children with nonspecific etiologies of mental retardation, and 22 typically developing children. Results indicated that compared to the other children, children with Down syndrome responded to distress in others by looking to them more, and offering more comfort in the form of prosocial responses. However, in a hypothetical empathy situation, children with Down syndrome were less likely to feel the same emotion as the protagonist than were the typical children. Children with Down syndrome differed from the children with nonspecific mental retardation only in their response to distress in others. The children with nonspecific mental retardation were more similar to than different from the MA-matched typical children. These results suggest some etiology-associated differences in empathy and response to distress in children with mental retardation.