Empathy: The Science of Knowing Others

As a nursing professional, you may believe that empathy is a basic skill.  Perhaps you can recall many of these concepts from your first-year nursing program.  It may surprise you to hear that empathy declines throughout health professional training (Kelm et al., 2014), with lowest level of empathy consistently reported among the most experienced health professionals (Kelm et al., 2014; Onofrei et al., 2023; Parsons et al., 2018).  Nursing professionals who center the patient’s experience around their own past experiences and emotions are also less likely to recognize negative emotions in any reliable way (Israelashvili et al., 2020a).  Conversely, empathy training programs are associated with increased patient satisfaction and adoption of empathic behaviours in nursing practice (Baisden & Gray, 2020; Sung & Kweon, 2022).

Within nursing practice settings, empathy represents a key therapeutic intervention which requires a diverse range of moral, cognitive, affective and behavioural skills and abilities (Mercer & Reynolds, 2002).  Despite such complexity, Decety and Holvoet (2021) contend that all empathy skills can be broadly categorized into one of two domains:

• Emotional empathy:  A sensitivity to feeling the emotional states of other people.
• Cognitive empathy:  The ability to understand other’s perspectives, outside of their own perspective.

Historically, there has been significant disagreement as to whether empathy was an emotional process, a behaviour, or a cognitive process (Deutsch & Madle, 1975).  This debate is now largely settled, with a general agreement that empathy may provoke emotional or cognitive changes in the nurse. As will be discussed in this module, empathy is essential to developing therapeutic relationships and coming to understand your patient in care (Derksen et al., 2013).