Teaching Empathy in Healthcare

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

   PDF

2. What Is Empathy and How Can It Be Evaluated?

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. What Is Empathy?

      • Zimri S. Yaseen, Adriana E. Foster

      Pages 3-16

   3. Neurobiology of Empathy

      • Michelle Trieu, Adriana E. Foster, Zimri S. Yaseen, Courtnie Beaubian, Raffaella Calati

      Pages 17-39

   4. The Physiological Nature of Caring: Understanding Nonverbal Behavior

      • Anjelica J. Halim, Adriana E. Foster, Laura Ayala, Erica D. Musser

      Pages 41-61

   5. Measuring Empathy in Health Care

      • Gabriel Sanchez, Melissa Ward Peterson, Erica D. Musser, Igor Galynker, Simran Sandhu, Adriana E. Foster

      Pages 63-82

3. Approaches to Empathy Education

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 83-83

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   2. Teaching Clinicians About Affect

      • Tamara Zec, David Forrest

      Pages 85-97

   3. Teaching Emotional Self-Awareness and What to Do with It in Patient Encounters

      • Zimri S. Yaseen, Sarah Bloch-Elkouby, Shira Barzilay

      Pages 99-116

   4. Getting on the Same Page: Introducing Alliance Rupture as a Path to Mutual Empathy and Change in Psychotherapy

      • Lauren M. Lipner, Di Liu, J. Christopher Muran

      Pages 117-126

   5. The Empathy Seminar: Building a Strong Foundation for Caregiving Competency

      • James W. Lomax, Adriana E. Foster

      Pages 127-142

   6. Can Virtual Humans Teach Empathy?

      • Benjamin Lok, Adriana E. Foster

      Pages 143-163

   7. Developing Empathy Through Narrative Medicine

      • Gregory Schneider, Marin Gillis, Heidi von Harscher

      Pages 165-178

   8. Teaching Cultural Humility: Understanding Others by Reflecting on Ourselves

      • Carissa Cabán-Alemán, Jordanne King, Auralyd Padilla, Jeanie Tse

      Pages 179-191

   9. Coaching Nurses to Care: Empathetic Communication in Challenging Situations

      • Jean Hannan, Mark Fonseca, Edgar Garcia Lara, Mercedes Braithwaite, Faith Irving, Elizabeth Azutillo

      Pages 193-209

   10. Teaching Advanced Communication Skills to Trainees Caring for the Critically Injured

       • Sangeeta Lamba, Anastasia Kunac, Anne Mosenthal

       Pages 211-219

4. Empathy: A Systemic Perspective

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 221-221

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   2. Empathy and Implicit Bias: Can Empathy Training Improve Equity?

      • Javeed Sukhera

      Pages 223-238

   3. Empathy, Burnout, and the Hidden Curriculum in Medical Training

      • Rabia Khan, Maria Athina (Tina) Martimianakis

      Pages 239-250

   4. Thwarting Stigma and Dehumanization Through Empathy

      • Aniuska M. Luna, Emily Jurich, Francisco Quintana

      Pages 251-267

Empathy is essential to effectively engaging patients as partners in care. Clinicians’ empathy is increasingly understood as a professional competency, a mode and process of relating that can be learned and taught. Communication and empathy training are penetrating healthcare professions curricula as knowledge about the most effective modalities to train, maintain, and deepen empathy grows. This book draws on a wide range of contributors across many disciplines, and takes an evidence-based and longitudinal approach to clinical empathy education. It takes the reader on an engaging journey from understanding what empathy is (and how it can be measured), to approaches to empathy education informed by those understandings. It elaborates the benefits of embedding empathy training in graduate and post-graduate curricula and the importance of teaching empathy in accord with the clinician’s stage of professional development. Finally, it examines systemic perspectives on empathy and empathy education in the clinical setting, addressing issues such as equity, stigma, and law. Each section is full of the latest evidence-based research, including, notably, the advances that have been made over recent decades in the neurobiology of empathy.

Perspectives among the interdisciplinary chapters include:

• Neurobiology of empathy   
• Measuring empathy in healthcare   
• Teaching clinicians about affect   
• Teaching cultural humility: Understanding the core of others by reflecting on ours   
• Empathy and implicit bias: Can empathy training improve equity?   

Teaching Empathy in Healthcare: Building a New Core Competency takes an innovative and comprehensive approach towards a developed understanding of empathy in the clinical context. This evidence-based book is set to become a classic text on the topic of empathy in healthcare settings, and will appeal to a broad readership of clinicians, educators, and researchers in clinical medicine, neuroscience, behavioral health, and the social sciences, leaders in educational and professional organizations, and anyone interested in the healthcare services they utilize.

• empathy
• compassion
• cultural humanity
• dehumanization
• facial affective behavior
• mirror neurons
• non-verbal behavior
• patient-clinician communication
• self-awareness
• stigma
• virtual humans
• medical education
• therapeutic alliance
• working alliance

• Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, Florida International University, Miami, USA

  Adriana E. Foster

• Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, New York, USA

  Zimri S. Yaseen

Adriana Foster, MD is a practicing psychiatrist, educator and researcher. Foster’s clinical experience includes inpatient, outpatient and emergency psychiatry settings. Foster has been actively teaching clinical medicine and psychiatric curriculum for the past 17 years. Foster led a Veterans Affairs clinical program and was a psychiatry clerkship director for a large medical school. Currently, Dr Foster is the Vice-Chair for Clinical and Research programs in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, Florida International University, in Miami, Florida. Foster’s educational research focuses on simulation in medical education and exploring the utility of virtual patients in teaching empathy in medical interview. Foster co-led a group of educators at the Association of Directors of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry (ADMSEP) who created a free online collection of peer-reviewed mental health educational tools. Foster has long collaborated with Virtual Experiences Research Group at University of Florida’s Computer Information Science and Engineering. Foster published numerous peer-reviewed papers and educational tools, which are available for widespread use on platforms like ADMSEP’s website and AAMC’s MedEdPORTAL.

Zimri Yaseen, MD is a practicing psychiatrist, educator and researcher. His clinical experience
includes inpatient, emergency, and outpatient psychiatry. He has been actively teaching
clinical psychiatry, psychotherapy, and the integration of psychodynamic approaches with psychopharmacology for the past 6 years. He is assistant director at the Family Center for Bipolar Disorder, and an active collaborator and psychotherapy supervisor with the Brief Relational Therapy research project at Mount Sinai Beth Israel. Dr. Yaseen’s clinical research experience includes that of co-investigator on foundation-sponsored studies on suicide and adult attachment. Dr. Yaseen has published numerous peer-reviewed papers on these topics.

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