Empathetic Orientation in Dentistry students from Latin America. Literature review.

Abstract

Empathy, defined as 'the capacity to relate to someone else's perspective or mental state', has a strong impact on the physician-patient relationship and has the potential to improve the quality of health care. The Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE) measures empathy in terms of quantity. It was created to assist medical students, physicians, and people related to health care in general and it has been validated into Spanish showing adequate psychometric properties. The concern for empathy in dentistry students is related to the need for training not only technically, but also socially skilled professionals, since social abilities have a strong impact on performance as well as in the patient's appreciation and satisfaction. The goal of this report is to show all the studies using the JSE scale for measuring empathy in dentistry students from Latin America. The reviewed studies show the empathy levels vary in Latin-American dentistry students when comparing gender and class year variables. Also, there is a tendency to find higher empathy levels when it comes to women's performance and that of those soon to be graduate. However, the criteria did not account for more than 20% of the variance of empathy in these studies. Therefore, it would be necessary to keep researching in this field, taking different predictor variables into consideration in order to understand what factors are associated with the presence and intensity of empathy, and their impact in clinical practice. Keywords: Empathy, students, dentistry.Orientación empática en estudiantes de odontología de Latinoamérica. Revisión de la literatura.Resumen: La empatía, definida como la "Identificación mental y afectiva de un sujeto con el estado de ánimo de otro" tiene un fuerte impacto en la relación médico-paciente y tiene el potencial de mejorar la calidad de la atención en salud. La Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE), es una escala que mide cuantitativamente la empatía. Fue creada para estudiantes de medicina, médicos y estudiantes y trabajadores de otras carreras de la salud y fue validada al idioma castellano demostrando propiedades psicométricas adecuadas. La preocupación por la empatía en los estudiantes de odontología se relaciona con la necesidad de formar profesionales competentes, no sólo en el aspecto técnico, sino también en las habilidades sociales, las que tienen un gran impacto en el rendimiento, así como en la apreciación y satisfacción del paciente. El objetivo de la presente revisión es presentar todos los estudios en que se ha aplicado la escala JSE en estudiantes de odontología de Latinoamérica. Según lo encontrado, la empatía presenta un comportamiento variable en los estudiantes de odontología latinoamericanos, al comparar variables sexo y año de la carrera, existiendo una tendencia a mostrar mayores niveles de empatía en el sexo femenino y en los cursos superiores, sin embargo, en ninguno de los estudios estas variables explicaron más allá del 20% de la varianza de la empatía. Por lo mismo, resulta necesario seguir investigando s...

Empathy, Components of Empathy and Curricular Evaluation of the Faculty of Dentistry, Evangelical University of El Salvador

“…The values of R2 = 14.9% estimated in this research is evidence of the little variability that empathy, the course and gender factors and the latter explain very little about such variation; a result consistent with those of other studies [28]. Most studies do not take this latter statistician into consideration (R2) when empathy is studied within a given population.…”

Empathy Gender in Dental Students in Latin America: An Exploratory and Cross-Sectional Study

“…[40] in Argentina. All these results show that there is variability in the answer of empathy levels in both students outside and inside from all the different universities considered in this study [41]. The totality of authors previously mentioned developed their research in LA with the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE), adapted to the health area researched, therefore, the difference of tools seems not to be the variability source and they can be compared not only by the scale used, but by the same methodological conceptions and statistics with which these studies were developed.…”

“…Vera [41], analyzing some of these studies about empathy in dental students from LA, sets three generalizations: 1) the empathy represents a variable behavior; 2) there is a tendency to show higher levels of empathy in female and in higher courses and 3)these variables do not explain more than 20% of the variation found. The authors from this study completely agree with the generalization 1) and 3), but the data observed in this current study shows variability in the gender and, therefore, it is not possible to coincide with the generalization 2), in relation to the "gender" factor.…”

Erosion of empathy during medical training by gender. A cross-sectional study

“…However, some investigations have found that the "school year" factor has low R 2 values (from 0.02 to 0.06); this means that this factor may only explain 2-6% of the total variation in the empathy outcome measure. [21][22][23] Based on this empirical evidence: a) cross-sectional studies about empathy, considering the school year factor, may be valid to analyze empathic erosion and b) in agreement with some authors, empathy should be studied exploring several factors 3,11,16,17,24 and, from the causality standpoint, it has an alternative-contributory nature. 25 These results show that there is variability in the overall empathic response and its components over the school years and do not fit completely into the erosion model proposed by Hojat et al 13 Our objective was not to deny the model of empathic erosion but to establish that this may be considered a specific element of several different models of distribution of the means in the school year factor.…”