Empathy is desirable in all health care professionals in their interactions with patients and each other. Empathy in its cognitive (perspective-taking) and affective forms has been well-studied in the literature and in fact, is shown in most studies to decline during undergraduate and graduate medical education.
Empathy has also been shown to be inversely proportional to one’s sense of power (SOP) in the business literature. In addition, the relationship of empathy to personality traits has not been examined.
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Empathy has also been shown to
be inversely proportional to
one’s sense of power
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This cross-sectional study of four cohorts of undergraduate medical students at a private mid-Atlantic medical school compares the empathy of first, second, third and fourth year medical students to see if there is a decline across the medical school experience.
Toto RL1, Man L, Blatt B, Simmens SJ, Greenberg L.
