Exploring Empathy: A Conceptual Fit for Nursing Practice?

Abstract

After three decades, the efficacy of empathy in the clinical setting remains undocumented. Recently, concerns have been raised that the concept may be inappropriate and even harmful to the nurse-patient relationship. An analysis of the concept indicates that empathy consists of moral, emotive, cognitive and behavioral components. By tracing the integration of this concept into nursing, we suggest that empathy was uncritically adopted from psychology and is actually a poor fit for the clinical reality of nursing practice. Other communication strategies presently devalued, such as sympathy, pity, consolation, compassion and commiseration, need to be reexamined and may be more appropriate than empathy during certain phases of the illness experience. Directions for future research are suggested.

Empathy, sympathy and compassion in healthcare: Is there a problem? Is there a difference? Does it matter?

“…18 There is evidence to support the claim that empathy increases motivation to perform pro-social and altruistic acts so overlapping with notions of compassion. 38,39 Feminist care ethics maintains that moral thought and action require both reasons and emotions as well as attention to the needs of particular others [40][41][42] From a care ethics perspective, the practice of caring is integral to the moral life and empathy is an important element of caring.…”

“…18 This cognitive requirement differentiates empathy from sympathy and compassion. Cognitive empathy has been described as 'detached concern' or the ability of one individual to understand the experiences of another without evoking a personal emotional response.…”

“…17 Affective empathy is the ability to subjectively experience and share in another's psychological state or feelings. 18 Sharing the emotion (affective matching) may lead to empathic distress or concern which precedes and contributes to helping behaviour. 19 In affective matching, the doctor experiences the same type of emotion as the patient; this process also involves cognitive evaluation and imagination.…”

Clarifying empathy: the first step to more humane clinical care

“…22 From a broad perspective, empathy becomes a unique kind of understanding through which we experience what it is like to be another person:…”

How do newly-qualified doctors perceive empathy in medical training and practice?

“…It has been suggested that it is possible to learn the cognitive components of empathy even in the absence of the affective component [17]. Medical practice is intense and often highly pressured.…”