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Empathy through the Pandemic: Changes of Different Emphatic Dimensions during the COVID-19 Outbreak
Growing evidence suggests that empathy is a relevant psychological trait to face the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, but at the present very little is known on whether this multi-dimensional construct has been affected by the pandemic outbreak differently in its separate components. Her...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8872216/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35206623 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19042435 |
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author | Baiano, Chiara Raimo, Gennaro Zappullo, Isa Marra, Marialaura Cecere, Roberta Trojano, Luigi Conson, Massimiliano |
author_facet | Baiano, Chiara Raimo, Gennaro Zappullo, Isa Marra, Marialaura Cecere, Roberta Trojano, Luigi Conson, Massimiliano |
author_sort | Baiano, Chiara |
collection | PubMed |
description | Growing evidence suggests that empathy is a relevant psychological trait to face the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, but at the present very little is known on whether this multi-dimensional construct has been affected by the pandemic outbreak differently in its separate components. Here, we aimed at filling this gap by capitalizing on the opportunity of having collected data from different self-report measures and cognitive tasks assessing the main dimensions of empathy immediately before the beginning of the global pandemic and about one year later. The results showed a detrimental impact of the pandemic outbreak on empathic social skills but not on both cognitive (perspective-taking) and emotional empathy that instead significantly improved. Thus, reduced empathic social skills could be a weakness to be targeted in psychological interventions to help people cope with the mental health challenges related to COVID-19 pandemic, whereas the ability of understanding another’s mental states and emotions could represent a strength in dealing with the current long-lasting crisis. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8872216 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-88722162022-02-25 Empathy through the Pandemic: Changes of Different Emphatic Dimensions during the COVID-19 Outbreak Baiano, Chiara Raimo, Gennaro Zappullo, Isa Marra, Marialaura Cecere, Roberta Trojano, Luigi Conson, Massimiliano Int J Environ Res Public Health Article Growing evidence suggests that empathy is a relevant psychological trait to face the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, but at the present very little is known on whether this multi-dimensional construct has been affected by the pandemic outbreak differently in its separate components. Here, we aimed at filling this gap by capitalizing on the opportunity of having collected data from different self-report measures and cognitive tasks assessing the main dimensions of empathy immediately before the beginning of the global pandemic and about one year later. The results showed a detrimental impact of the pandemic outbreak on empathic social skills but not on both cognitive (perspective-taking) and emotional empathy that instead significantly improved. Thus, reduced empathic social skills could be a weakness to be targeted in psychological interventions to help people cope with the mental health challenges related to COVID-19 pandemic, whereas the ability of understanding another’s mental states and emotions could represent a strength in dealing with the current long-lasting crisis. MDPI 2022-02-20 /pmc/articles/PMC8872216/ /pubmed/35206623 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19042435 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Baiano, Chiara Raimo, Gennaro Zappullo, Isa Marra, Marialaura Cecere, Roberta Trojano, Luigi Conson, Massimiliano Empathy through the Pandemic: Changes of Different Emphatic Dimensions during the COVID-19 Outbreak |
title | Empathy through the Pandemic: Changes of Different Emphatic Dimensions during the COVID-19 Outbreak |
title_full | Empathy through the Pandemic: Changes of Different Emphatic Dimensions during the COVID-19 Outbreak |
title_fullStr | Empathy through the Pandemic: Changes of Different Emphatic Dimensions during the COVID-19 Outbreak |
title_full_unstemmed | Empathy through the Pandemic: Changes of Different Emphatic Dimensions during the COVID-19 Outbreak |
title_short | Empathy through the Pandemic: Changes of Different Emphatic Dimensions during the COVID-19 Outbreak |
title_sort | empathy through the pandemic: changes of different emphatic dimensions during the covid-19 outbreak |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8872216/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35206623 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19042435 |
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