Psychiatrists’ Illustration of Awe in Empathic Listening Assessments: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Background"Awe" is typically an inspiring emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli signifying the transcendence beyond all cognitive frames of reference when we encounter the unexpected. Physicians' experience of awe in clinical care interactions has not been studied in an empirical, evidence-based way. We aim to present a focused study of awe in a psychiatrist's empathic listening (EL) assessments and propose an evidence-based framework to study it. MethodologyThis is an exploratory case series of a psychiatrist's EL interactions (mean duration/ x̄ of 46.17 minutes) with six patients (two males and four females) aged 32-72 years (x̄ = 54.67, σ = 16.64). Using the method of autoethnography, the verbal and nonverbal aspects of the EL assessments were analyzed and open-coded to generate qualitative data. ResultsThe study revealed that the data in all the case studies could be classed into two thematic groups, namely, mindfulness and transpersonal mindfulness. The emotions of "awe" and "non-agency" were ubiquitous in all six case studies both for the psychiatrist and patients. ConclusionsRecognizing the awe and non-agency in EL interaction is essential in conceptualizing the "mindfulness-totranscendence" framework and the first step toward the evidence-based study of transcendence/metaphysics in phenomenological psychiatry.