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Empathy in Clinical Practice: How Individual Dispositions, Gender, and Experience Moderate Empathic Concern, Burnout, and Emotional Distress in Physicians

To better understand clinical empathy and what factors can undermine its experience and outcome in care-giving settings, a large-scale study was conducted with 7,584 board certified practicing physicians. Online validated instruments assessing different aspects of empathy, distress, burnout, altruis...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Gleichgerrcht, Ezequiel, Decety, Jean
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3631218/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23620760
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0061526
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author Gleichgerrcht, Ezequiel
Decety, Jean
author_facet Gleichgerrcht, Ezequiel
Decety, Jean
author_sort Gleichgerrcht, Ezequiel
collection PubMed
description To better understand clinical empathy and what factors can undermine its experience and outcome in care-giving settings, a large-scale study was conducted with 7,584 board certified practicing physicians. Online validated instruments assessing different aspects of empathy, distress, burnout, altruistic behavior, emotional awareness, and well-being were used. Compassion satisfaction was strongly associated with empathic concern, perspective taking and altruism, while compassion fatigue (burnout and secondary traumatic stress) was more closely related to personal distress and alexithymia. Gender had a highly selective effect on empathic concern, with women displaying higher values, which led to a wide array of negative and devalued feelings. Years of experience did not influence dispositional measures per se after controlling for the effect of age and gender. Participants who experienced compassion fatigue with little to no compassion satisfaction showed the highest scores on personal distress and alexithymia as well as the strongest indicators of compassion fatigue. Physicians who have difficulty regulating their negative arousal and describing and identifying emotions seem to be more prone to emotional exhaustion, detachment, and a low sense of accomplishment. On the contrary, the ability to engage in self-other awareness and regulate one’s emotions and the tendency to help others, seem to contribute to the sense of compassion that comes from assisting patients in clinical practice.
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spelling pubmed-36312182013-04-25 Empathy in Clinical Practice: How Individual Dispositions, Gender, and Experience Moderate Empathic Concern, Burnout, and Emotional Distress in Physicians Gleichgerrcht, Ezequiel Decety, Jean PLoS One Research Article To better understand clinical empathy and what factors can undermine its experience and outcome in care-giving settings, a large-scale study was conducted with 7,584 board certified practicing physicians. Online validated instruments assessing different aspects of empathy, distress, burnout, altruistic behavior, emotional awareness, and well-being were used. Compassion satisfaction was strongly associated with empathic concern, perspective taking and altruism, while compassion fatigue (burnout and secondary traumatic stress) was more closely related to personal distress and alexithymia. Gender had a highly selective effect on empathic concern, with women displaying higher values, which led to a wide array of negative and devalued feelings. Years of experience did not influence dispositional measures per se after controlling for the effect of age and gender. Participants who experienced compassion fatigue with little to no compassion satisfaction showed the highest scores on personal distress and alexithymia as well as the strongest indicators of compassion fatigue. Physicians who have difficulty regulating their negative arousal and describing and identifying emotions seem to be more prone to emotional exhaustion, detachment, and a low sense of accomplishment. On the contrary, the ability to engage in self-other awareness and regulate one’s emotions and the tendency to help others, seem to contribute to the sense of compassion that comes from assisting patients in clinical practice. Public Library of Science 2013-04-19 /pmc/articles/PMC3631218/ /pubmed/23620760 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0061526 Text en © 2013 Gleichgerrcht, Decety http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Gleichgerrcht, Ezequiel
Decety, Jean
Empathy in Clinical Practice: How Individual Dispositions, Gender, and Experience Moderate Empathic Concern, Burnout, and Emotional Distress in Physicians
title Empathy in Clinical Practice: How Individual Dispositions, Gender, and Experience Moderate Empathic Concern, Burnout, and Emotional Distress in Physicians
title_full Empathy in Clinical Practice: How Individual Dispositions, Gender, and Experience Moderate Empathic Concern, Burnout, and Emotional Distress in Physicians
title_fullStr Empathy in Clinical Practice: How Individual Dispositions, Gender, and Experience Moderate Empathic Concern, Burnout, and Emotional Distress in Physicians
title_full_unstemmed Empathy in Clinical Practice: How Individual Dispositions, Gender, and Experience Moderate Empathic Concern, Burnout, and Emotional Distress in Physicians
title_short Empathy in Clinical Practice: How Individual Dispositions, Gender, and Experience Moderate Empathic Concern, Burnout, and Emotional Distress in Physicians
title_sort empathy in clinical practice: how individual dispositions, gender, and experience moderate empathic concern, burnout, and emotional distress in physicians
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3631218/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23620760
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0061526
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