Can Virtual Humans Teach Empathy?

Lok, Benjamin; Foster, Adriana

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-29876-0_9

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…In addition to virtual role-play simulation studies, numerous publications demonstrate the efficacy of using VPs to train health professions students and practicing health professionals in communication skills, including patient-centered communication, empathy, and conflict resolution (Cordar et al, 2014(Cordar et al, , 2015Kleinsmith et al, 2015;Robb et al, 2015;Guetterman et al, 2019;Lok and Foster, 2019). Most of the trainings use storytelling in their instruction and integrate aspects of reallife scenarios to capture student attention and engage them emotionally and cognitively to support learning (McNett, 2016).…”

Section: The Advantages and Disadvantages Of Virtual Patients As A Me...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another study demonstrated that nurses were more likely to ask for input from virtual surgeons than they were real surgeons (Robb et al, 2015). There is also support for the use of virtual humans teaching empathy in clinical scenarios (Lok and Foster, 2019). For example, a study at the University of Florida College of Medicine demonstrated that when medical students interacted with VPs and human SPs, they were significantly more empathetic with VPs (Kleinsmith et al, 2015).…”

Section: The Advantages and Disadvantages Of Virtual Patients As A Me...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Validity of a Patient Communication Scale

Quinn,

Khalid,

Albright

2023

Front. Commun.

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BackgroundSince the 1960s, standardized patients (SPs) have been used to prepare medical students for clinical work for these patients provide a controlled domain for learners. Specifically, these type of formative experiences provide a low stakes environment for practice and feedback, thereby increasing learner comfort in communicating with patients. Communication is the cornerstone of patient care, and it is well-established as a core clinical competency for medical students by numerous medical boards, associations, and accreditation agencies. While methods for communication training are of paramount importance, no validated scales assess the impact of these trainings on patient-provider communication where measures are based on attitudinal constructs that predict behavior, such as self-efficacy and preparedness. Thus, the aim of this study is to validity of a Patient Communication Scale (PCS) using an online virtual role-play training simulation.MethodTo validate the scale, 117 medical students were administered the PCS survey before and after completing a professional development virtual role-play simulation where they practiced motivational interviewing skills, talking to a patient who insists on antibiotics for a viral infection.ResultsA confirmatory factor analysis supported the two-factor model based on the subscales of preparedness and self-efficacy. Factor loadings showed all items correlated highly with theoretical constructs (r ≥ 0.902, p < 0.001). The PCS had high internal consistency (α = 0.916). Because there is a lack of scales that have been used to assess medical student as well as medical practitioner patient communication capabilities, specifically their preparedness and self-efficacy, criterion-related validity was not assessed. Convergent, content and construct validity were established.ConclusionThe Patient Communication Scale appears to be a valid tool in measuring the impact of online patient-provider communication skills training and holds promise for assessing other delivery methods.

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Section: The Advantages and Disadvantages Of Virtual Patients As A Me...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Advantages and Disadvantages Of Virtual Patients As A Me...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Validity of a Patient Communication Scale

Quinn,

Khalid,

Albright

2023

Front. Commun.

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“…On these grounds, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) claims that training empathy skills should receive a more prominent role in today's higher education [1]. To train empathy in students, educational institutions traditionally rely on experiential learning scenarios, such as shadowing, communication skills training or role-playing, e.g., in medical education [6]. Individual empathy training is therefore only available for a limited number of students, since individual tutoring throughout a student's learning journey is often hindered due to traditional large-scale lectures or the growing field of distance learning scenarios such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs, [7]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A promising way to support students to train the ability to react to other people's observed experiences [2] and enable teachers to convey it to classes of large sizes and independent from location is the usage of adaptive technology-based applications in a pedagogical scenario for a student's learning journey. Researchers especially from the field of Educational Technology have designed pedagogical scenarios to train the empathy skills of students through virtual reality role-playing for social work education [10], virtual agents to simulate patient treatments for nurses (e.g., [6]) or adaptive empathy text feedback on computer-mediated communication platforms to foster empathy for company-client and employee-customer relationships [11]. However, novel technologyenhanced pedagogical scenarios based on recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Machine Learning (ML) that allow new forms of human-computer interaction to support learners in learning empathetic interaction through adaptive tutoring fall rather short in literature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and Evaluation of an Adaptive Empathy Learning Tool

Wambsganss¹,

Weber²,

Söllner³

2021

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Empathy is an elementary skill for daily interactions and for professional communication, agile teamwork and successful leadership and thus elementary for educational curricula. However, educational organizations face difficulties in providing the boundary conditions necessary for their students to develop empathy skills due to the lack of individual support in traditional large-scale and growing distance-learning scenarios. Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory, we propose an adaptive empathy learning tool that helps students develop their ability to react to other people's observed experiences through individual feedback in large-scale or distance learning scenarios. Based on a design science research project, we propose a set of design principles and instantiate and evaluate them with our prototype Eva in an online experiment with 65 students. The findings suggest that an adaptive empathy learning tool that follows our design principles is a promising approach to individually support students in their ability to react to other people's observed abilities in traditional learning scenarios.

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“…To train students with regard to empathy, educational institutions traditionally rely on experiential learning scenarios, such as shadowing, communication skills training, or role playing (Lok and Foster, 2019;van Berkhout and Malouff, 2016). Individual empathy training is only available for a limited number of students since individual feedback through a student's learning journey is often hindered due to large-scale lectures or the growing field of distance learning scenarios such as Massive Open Online Classes (MOOCs) (Seaman et al, 2018;Hattie and Timperley, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Supporting Cognitive and Emotional Empathic Writing of Students

Wambsganss

Niklaus

Söllner

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Confer

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We present an annotation approach to capturing emotional and cognitive empathy in student-written peer reviews on business models in German. We propose an annotation scheme that allows us to model emotional and cognitive empathy scores based on three types of review components. Also, we conducted an annotation study with three annotators based on 92 student essays to evaluate our annotation scheme. The obtained inter-rater agreement of α=0.79 for the components and the multi-π=0.41 for the empathy scores indicate that the proposed annotation scheme successfully guides annotators to a substantial to moderate agreement. Moreover, we trained predictive models to detect the annotated empathy structures and embedded them in an adaptive writing support system for students to receive individual empathy feedback independent of an instructor, time, and location. We evaluated our tool in a peer learning exercise with 58 students and found promising results for perceived empathy skill learning, perceived feedback accuracy, and intention to use. Finally, we present our freely available corpus of 500 empathy-annotated, student-written peer reviews on business models and our annotation guidelines to encourage future research on the design and development of empathy support systems.

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Can Virtual Humans Teach Empathy?

Cited by 8 publications

References 41 publications

Validity of a Patient Communication Scale

Validity of a Patient Communication Scale

Design and Evaluation of an Adaptive Empathy Learning Tool

Supporting Cognitive and Emotional Empathic Writing of Students

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