Empathy types in medical and pedagogical professions.

Abstract

Background: The aim of the study was to find out whether certain types of empathy are over- or underrepresented in medical and educational professions. We used the following four types of empathy profiles: "Situation-dependent altruists" (A) have high affective and cognitive empathy aspects with high personal distress. "High-functioning empaths" (B) differ from pattern A by the low distress. People who have neither clear affective nor cognitive empathy traits, but are characterized by high distress, are "low neurotic empaths" (C). Types whose mean scores on all three aspects were below the mean are referred to as "low empaths" (D).

Participants and procedure: The sample consisted of 439 subjects. The group of medical professionals included doctors, nursing staff, and other medical staff. The group of educators included teachers, social pedagogues, educators, social workers and special needs teachers. We used the German version of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) to measure empathy.

Results: The two occupational groups differed from each other non-significantly in their respective distribution. In the nursing staff sample, profile B is clearly overrepresented and profile C is clearly underrepresented. Nursing staff therefore have a high level of emotional concern and perspective taking together with lower distress. Nurses and pedagogical staff occur in our sample most frequently in the empathic pattern A and B.

Conclusions: The typologization of empathy skills proved to be a good method of describing affective and cognitive aspects of empathy within a personality. In addition, the results emphasize the importance of empathy training, which is well established in medical education but virtually non-existent in pedagogical education.