empathy

Brief training program improves resident physicians' empathy with patients
05/07/2012 - 10:35

Resident physicians' participation in a brief training program designed to increase empathy with their patients produced significant improvement in how patients perceived their interactions with the residents. This contrasts with several studies showing that empathy with patients usually drops during medical school and residency training. The report from a team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers will appear in the Journal of General Internal Medicine and has been released online.

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Neuroscientists explore how longstanding conflict influences empathy for others
01/23/2012 - 09:59

MIT postdoc Emile Bruneau has long been drawn to conflict — not as a participant, but an observer. In 1994, while doing volunteer work in South Africa, he witnessed firsthand the turmoil surrounding the fall of apartheid; during a 2001 trip to visit friends in Sri Lanka, he found himself in the midst of the violent conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military.
 

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Study examines what factors may predict intervention to stop bullies
12/20/2011 - 10:24

 A new study of more than 346 middle-school children indicates that boys are less likely than girls to intervene to protect a bullying victim, especially if the boy is a member of a peer group in which bullying is the norm. The study also suggests that anti-bullying programs that focus on bystander intervention and empathy training aren’t likely to have much impact unless attention is given to reducing bullying perpetration within children’s peer groups.

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Lower classes quicker to show compassion in the face of suffering
12/20/2011 - 07:30

Emotional differences between the rich and poor, as depicted in such Charles Dickens classics as “A Christmas Carol” and “A Tale of Two Cities,” may have a scientific basis. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that people in the lower socio-economic classes are more physiologically attuned to suffering, and quicker to express compassion than their more affluent counterparts.

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A Brain's Failure to Appreciate Others May Permit Human Atrocities
12/14/2011 - 22:59

Social neuroscience has shown through MRI studies that people normally activate a network in the brain related to social cognition -- thoughts, feelings, empathy, for example -- when viewing pictures of others or thinking about their thoughts.  But when participants in this study were asked to consider images of people they considered drug addicts, homeless people, and others they deemed low on the social ladder, parts of this network failed to engage.

 

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Researcher takes on ‘empathy fatigue’ in the workplace
12/07/2011 - 11:27

A nurse refuses to help an ailing alcoholic who is upset to find a hospital detox unit closed. A hospital clerk brushes off a deceased woman’s grieving family as they try to pay her bills and claim her belongings. A charge nurse keeps the mother of gunshot victim from seeing her son, saying the emergency room is “too busy.”

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