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Empathy for others’ suffering and its mediators in mental health professionals
Empathy is a complex cognitive and affective process that allows humans to experience concern for others, comprehend their emotions, and eventually help them. In addition to studies with healthy subjects and various neuropsychiatric populations, a few reports have examined this domain focusing on me...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5527046/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28743987 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-06775-y |
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author | Santamaría-García, Hernando Baez, Sandra García, Adolfo M. Flichtentrei, Daniel Prats, María Mastandueno, Ricardo Sigman, Mariano Matallana, Diana Cetkovich, Marcelo Ibáñez, Agustín |
author_facet | Santamaría-García, Hernando Baez, Sandra García, Adolfo M. Flichtentrei, Daniel Prats, María Mastandueno, Ricardo Sigman, Mariano Matallana, Diana Cetkovich, Marcelo Ibáñez, Agustín |
author_sort | Santamaría-García, Hernando |
collection | PubMed |
description | Empathy is a complex cognitive and affective process that allows humans to experience concern for others, comprehend their emotions, and eventually help them. In addition to studies with healthy subjects and various neuropsychiatric populations, a few reports have examined this domain focusing on mental health workers, whose daily work requires the development of a saliently empathic character. Building on this research line, the present population-based study aimed to (a) assess different dimensions of empathy for pain in mental health workers relative to general-physicians and non-medical workers; and (b) evaluate their relationship with relevant factors, such as moral profile, age, gender, years of experience, and workplace type. Relative to both control groups, mental health workers exhibited higher empathic concern and discomfort for others’ suffering, and they favored harsher punishment to harmful actions. Furthermore, this was the only group in which empathy variability was explained by moral judgments, years of experience, and workplace type. Taken together, these results indicate that empathy is continuously at stake in mental health care scenarios, as it can be affected by contextual factors and social contingencies. More generally, they highlight the importance of studying this domain in populations characterized by extreme empathic demands. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5527046 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-55270462017-08-02 Empathy for others’ suffering and its mediators in mental health professionals Santamaría-García, Hernando Baez, Sandra García, Adolfo M. Flichtentrei, Daniel Prats, María Mastandueno, Ricardo Sigman, Mariano Matallana, Diana Cetkovich, Marcelo Ibáñez, Agustín Sci Rep Article Empathy is a complex cognitive and affective process that allows humans to experience concern for others, comprehend their emotions, and eventually help them. In addition to studies with healthy subjects and various neuropsychiatric populations, a few reports have examined this domain focusing on mental health workers, whose daily work requires the development of a saliently empathic character. Building on this research line, the present population-based study aimed to (a) assess different dimensions of empathy for pain in mental health workers relative to general-physicians and non-medical workers; and (b) evaluate their relationship with relevant factors, such as moral profile, age, gender, years of experience, and workplace type. Relative to both control groups, mental health workers exhibited higher empathic concern and discomfort for others’ suffering, and they favored harsher punishment to harmful actions. Furthermore, this was the only group in which empathy variability was explained by moral judgments, years of experience, and workplace type. Taken together, these results indicate that empathy is continuously at stake in mental health care scenarios, as it can be affected by contextual factors and social contingencies. More generally, they highlight the importance of studying this domain in populations characterized by extreme empathic demands. Nature Publishing Group UK 2017-07-25 /pmc/articles/PMC5527046/ /pubmed/28743987 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-06775-y Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Santamaría-García, Hernando Baez, Sandra García, Adolfo M. Flichtentrei, Daniel Prats, María Mastandueno, Ricardo Sigman, Mariano Matallana, Diana Cetkovich, Marcelo Ibáñez, Agustín Empathy for others’ suffering and its mediators in mental health professionals |
title | Empathy for others’ suffering and its mediators in mental health professionals |
title_full | Empathy for others’ suffering and its mediators in mental health professionals |
title_fullStr | Empathy for others’ suffering and its mediators in mental health professionals |
title_full_unstemmed | Empathy for others’ suffering and its mediators in mental health professionals |
title_short | Empathy for others’ suffering and its mediators in mental health professionals |
title_sort | empathy for others’ suffering and its mediators in mental health professionals |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5527046/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28743987 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-06775-y |
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