Background: Moral emotions are a key element of our human morals. Emotions play an important role in the caring process. Decision-making and assessment in emergency situations are complex and they frequently result in different emotions and feelings among health-care professionals. Methods: The study had qualitative deductive design based on content analysis. Individual interviews and focus groups were conducted with sixteen participants. Results: The emerging category "emotions and feelings in caring" has been analysed according to Haidt, considering that moral emotions include the subcategories of "Condemning emotions", "Self-conscious emotions", "Suffering emotions" and "Praising emotions". Within these subcategories, we found that the feelings that nurses experienced when ethical conflicts arose in emergency situations were related to caring and decisions associated with it, even when they had experienced situations in which they believed they could have helped the patient differently, but the conditions at the time did not permit it and they felt that the ethical conflicts in clinical practice created a large degree of anxiety and moral stress. The nurses felt that caring, as seen from a nursing perspective, has a sensitive dimension that goes beyond the patient's own healing and, when this dimension is in conflict with the environment, it has a dehumanising effect. Positive feelings and satisfaction are created when nurses feel that care has met its objectives and that there has been an appropriate response to the needs. Conclusions: Moral emotions can help nurses to recognise situations that allow them to promote changes in the care of patients in extreme situations. They can also be the starting point for personal and professional growth and an evolution towards person-centred care.

Emotion is a capacity that impacts on nurses' experience and influences improvements in clinical practice. Recalling stories of satisfaction helps to reinforce good practice, while recalling stories of errors helps to identify difficulties in the profession and recognise new forms of action. The articulation of emotional competencies may support the development of nursing ethics in the intensive care unit to protect and defend their patients and improve their relationships with families in order to maximise the potential for patient care.

Ethical sensitivity is a requirement for people care as well as for decision-making in everyday practice. The aim is to present an adaptation and transcultural validation -in Spanish- of the Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire by Lützén et al. in Spain. In addition to that, we provide a practical implementation analysing the degree of moral sensitivity of nursing students. The data used for data collection were moral Sensitivity Questionnaire, socio-demographic data and a self-report questionnaire. The psychometric properties of the questionnaire were assessed, including validity and reliability. Fit indices of the overall model were computed. The fit indices of the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) indicate a poor fit, although the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) revealed two dimensions that show a better fit of its indices. Women and those women with more experience in the clinical setting have a higher mean score, as well as those who study in centers where the strategic lines are the humanization of care. Female nursing students with more experience in the clinical setting and with more educational training present higher sensitivity indexes, as well as those who study in centers where the strategic lines are the humanization of care. The findings confirm that the Lützén et al. questionnaire is multidimensional. In the Spanish sample, it was necessary to group the three initial factors into two: sense of moral burden and moral strength—grouping the moral responsibility items into the above items to make the instrument more resilient.

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