Heart and Head: Profiles and Predictors of Self-Assessed Cognitive and Affective Empathy in a Sample of Medical and Health Professional Students

Abstract

For medical and health professions, students learning to respond to others' distress with well-regulated empathy is an important developmental skill linked to positive health outcomes and professionalism. Our study aimed to investigate the sociodemographic, psychological, and psychosocial differences between medical (MS) and health professional (HPS) students and their empathic abilities, since both populations share common stressors, namely, dealing with suffering people. Additionally, we were interested in assessing the psychological and psychosocial predictors of empathy of MS compared to HPS. One hundred thirty MS and 86 HPS were administered the Patient Health Questionnaire-9, Interpersonal Reactivity Index, Integrative Hope Scale, and UCLA Loneliness Scale. The two groups showed differences in their contextual characteristics, with the HPS group having larger families, lower parents' education levels, and lower family income compared to the MS group. In both groups, ~15% of students reported previous contact for psychological problems. A higher proportion of HPS (23.3%) reported depressive symptoms than MS (10%), and female HPS reported more intense feelings of loneliness than other subgroups of students. No differences were found between the two groups in self-assessed cognitive and affective empathy. In both groups, women showed greater affective scores than men and, at the same time, seemed to be particularly prone to personal distress. The cognitive empathic dimension of “perspective taking” was predicted by young age (OR, 612; 95% CI, 1.395–15.242) and the overall socioeconomic status (OR, 3.175; 95% CI, 1.154–8.734) of the HPS. Self-assessed affective competence was predicted by female gender (OR, 3.112; 95% CI, 1.328–7.288), depressive symptomatology (OR, 2.777; 95% CI, 1.004–7.681), higher mother's level of education (OR, 2.764; 95% CI, 1.147–6.659), and feeling of hope related to social relationships (OR, 1.367; 95% CI, 1.152–1.622). Risk factors for poor self-assessed affective emphatic skills were previous contact for psychological problems (OR, 3.263; 95% CI, 1.238–8.601) and feelings of loneliness (OR, 1.18; 95% CI, 1.09–1.276). Our findings emphasize the need to test psychosocial models to better understand empathic skills.

Predictors of academic performance during the covid-19 outbreak: impact of distance education on mental health, social cognition and memory abilities in an Italian university student sample

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Longitudinal Mental Health Outcomes of Third-year Medical Students Rotating Through the Wards During COVID-19

“…The psychological impacts of COVID have been felt across the globe; in Italy, university students’ anxiety and depression increased with progression of days in lockdown ( Giusti et al, 2020 ) and in a Spanish population nearly 48% of adults experienced PTSD in response to COVID-19 confinement (Odriozola-Gonzalez et al, 2020). The changes experienced due to COVID-19 may impact future outcomes for medical students; one study found that previous psychological problems and loneliness can cause decreases in empathy, a crucial component of good clinical care ( Giusti et al, 2021a ), while another found that more than 55% of students had significant impairments in concentration and learning abilities due to distance learning ( Giusti et al, 2021b ).…”

Impact of COVID-19 on Rocky Vista University medical students’ mental health: A cross-sectional survey

“…Such isolation from the restriction, has been shown to affect academic performance in university students, along with negative exacerbation of their mental health symptoms . Many aspects that play a role in the quality of life for students have been impacted by the pandemic and these have been shown to influence the mental health of university students and medical students as well (Giusti et al, 2020;Carletto et al, 2022). In particular, medical students face a higher level of demand and stress than most at baseline, as medical education is considered to be among the most academically challenging and emotionally demanding of higher education programs (Rotenstein et al, 2016).…”