Caring is an essential component of nursing and the foundation of the nurse-patient relationship (Watson & Jean, 2009). Caring ability (CA) can be described as the nurse's ability to express caring attitudes and build supportive relationships with patients. Nurses with an improved CA can reduce patients' psychological stress and improve their coping skills and satisfaction (King et al., 2019).Psychiatric nurses, as one of the special groups in hospitals, provide services to patients with unexpected incidents such as assaults and suicidal self-inflicted injuries. And studies have demonstrated that psychiatric nurses lacked CA (Huimin et al., 2020), with their CA lower than that of nurses in general hospitals (Qing et al., 2018;Xu et al., 2021). The organization hardly provide humanistic training courses for nurses and the majority of nurses are mainly dedicated to clinical work, neglecting the importance of CA. Empathy is defined as the ability to recognize others' emotions, express understanding toward others' experiences, and respond appropriately (Stepien & Baernstein, 2006). As patients are often in difficult situations and experience painful or negative emotions, nurses who are