The association between empathy and artistic practice: a cross-sectional study with medical students

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Abstract

Background

Empathy is essential to medical practice, and efforts to cultivate it often include incorporating liberal arts into medical curricula to promote it. However, the association between empathy and engagement in artistic practice beyond the medical curricula remains unclear. This study aims to assess the association between medical students´ empathy and their engagement in artistic activities.

Methods

Students enrolled at 11 Portuguese medical schools were invited to participate in an online survey. The survey included questions about their artistic practice, and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) to measure empathy.

Results

A total of 450 medical students completed the survey. 158 students (35%) were actively engaged in the arts, 118 of which practiced music (75%). Participants involved in artistic activities demonstrated significantly higher scores in the Fantasy subscale compared to their peers. Participants engaged in multiple artistic activities scored significantly higher in overall IRI, as well as in Empathic Concern and Fantasy subscales, compared to those practicing only one artistic activity. Participants who began their artistic practice earlier tended to achieve higher scores in overall IRI and on the Empathic Concern subscale.

Conclusions

The present study highlights a significant positive association between artistic practice and empathy levels among medical students. Further research is recommended to clarify this association, potentially informing revisions to medical school curricula.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-024-06146-y.

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Most cited references 35

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Empathy decline and its reasons: a systematic review of studies with medical students and residents.

Melanie Neumann, Friedrich Edelhäuser, Diethard Tauschel … (2011)

Empathy is a key element of patient-physician communication; it is relevant to and positively influences patients' health. The authors systematically reviewed the literature to investigate changes in trainee empathy and reasons for those changes during medical school and residency. The authors conducted a systematic search of studies concerning trainee empathy published from January 1990 to January 2010, using manual methods and the PubMed, EMBASE, and PsycINFO databases. They independently reviewed and selected quantitative and qualitative studies for inclusion. Intervention studies, those that evaluated psychometric properties of self-assessment tools, and those with a sample size <30 were excluded. Eighteen studies met the inclusion criteria: 11 on medical students and 7 on residents. Three longitudinal and six cross-sectional studies of medical students demonstrated a significant decrease in empathy during medical school; one cross-sectional study found a tendency toward a decrease, and another suggested stable scores. The five longitudinal and two cross-sectional studies of residents showed a decrease in empathy during residency. The studies pointed to the clinical practice phase of training and the distress produced by aspects of the "hidden," "formal," and "informal" curricula as main reasons for empathy decline. The results of the reviewed studies, especially those with longitudinal data, suggest that empathy decline during medical school and residency compromises striving toward professionalism and may threaten health care quality. Theory-based investigations of the factors that contribute to empathy decline among trainees and improvement of the validity of self-assessment methods are necessary for further research.

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Principles and Practice of Structural Equation Modeling

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A Meta-Analysis of Response Rates in Web- or Internet-Based Surveys

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Author and article information

Contributors

Martim Fornetti:

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0009-0002-9419-9454

martimfornetti@edu.ulisboa.pt

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): BMC Med Educ

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): BMC Med Educ

Title: BMC Medical Education

Publisher: BioMed Central (London )

ISSN (Electronic): 1472-6920

Publication date (Electronic): 16 October 2024

Publication date PMC-release: 16 October 2024

Publication date Collection: 2024

Volume: 24

Electronic Location Identifier: 1156

Affiliations

[1 ]Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa, ( https://ror.org/01c27hj86) Lisboa, Portugal

[2 ]CICPSI, Faculdade de Psicologia, Universidade de Lisboa, ( https://ror.org/01c27hj86) Lisboa, Portugal

[3 ]Praceta José Saramago, Nr 1, 2° Dto, 1685-517 Caneças, Portugal

[4 ]Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa, ( https://ror.org/01c27hj86) Lisboa, Portugal

Author information

Martim Fornetti http://orcid.org/0009-0002-9419-9454

Miguel Barbosa http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0670-0425

Article

Publisher ID: 6146

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-024-06146-y

PMC ID: 11484329

PubMed ID: 39415188

SO-VID: d42f05c6-333b-4c2f-876c-a511a07a940a

License:

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

History

Date received : 4 September 2024

Date accepted : 7 October 2024

Funding

Funded by: Programa “Educação pela Ciência”, GAPIC / FMUL

Award ID: 20240028

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Education

Keywords: empathy,art,medical students

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Education

Keywords: empathy, art, medical students

The association between empathy and artistic practice: a cross-sectional study with medical students

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Citation Behaviour and Practice

Most cited references 35

Empathy decline and its reasons: a systematic review of studies with medical students and residents.

Principles and Practice of Structural Equation Modeling

A Meta-Analysis of Response Rates in Web- or Internet-Based Surveys

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