Welcome to the 22nd WCP Congress Program Scheduling

Abstract Body

Sympathy, empathy, and compassion are closely related terms that are often used interchangeably, Sympathy has been defined as an emotional reaction of pity toward the misfortune of another, especially those who are perceived as suffering unfairly.
Empathy is understood as a more complex interpersonal construct that involves awareness and intuition. Compassion is a ‘complementary social emotion, elicited by witnessing the suffering of others’ and is related with the feelings of concern, warmth associated to motivating of support. One of the most important tools for the quantitative assessment of empathy is the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE) which was originally used to evaluate empathy in medical students. It is self-administered and completed by physicians and other health professionals who provide care to patients in clinical settings.
Empathetic listening might result in compassion fatigue because of prolonged exposure to stress and all it evokes. A relatively high percentage of health professionals, about 70%, find it difficult to develop empathy with their health care users.
There are studies that support that being female is associated with higher levels of empathy.
Empathy is a concept central to psychiatry, psychotherapy and clinical psychology.
As many psychiatric conditions are associated with deficits or even lack of empathy, we discuss a limited number of these disorders including psychopathy/antisocial personality disorders, borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, autistic spectrum disorders, and alexithymia. In a series of studies, US clinicians read descriptions of potential patients whose symptoms were explained using either biological or psychosocial information.
Biological explanations have been thought to make patients appear less accountable for their disorders, which could increase clinicians’ empathy.
To the contrary, biological explanations evoked significantly less empathy. Although the ongoing shift toward biomedical conceptualizations has many benefits, the results reveal unintended negative consequences.