A course in empathy

The purpose of this project was to determine whether an empathy skills training course would produce an improvement in student nurses' Empathy Scale scores. Empathic skills were defined as the ability to communicate an accurate understanding of another's feeling and experience, and were operationally measured with a paper-and-pencil test (the Empathy Scale, Gazda, et al., 1977). In a posttest-only control group experimental design, a random sample of two groups of nursing students completed these measures. Empathy Scale scores were the dependent variable and the empathy skills course was the independent variable. A t-test demonstrated that students who had completed the empathy skills course had significantly lower (more empathic) scores on the Empathy Scale (p less than .05). Analysis of demographic data using Pearson's correlation coefficient showed no significant relationship between scores on the Empathy Scale and age (r = -.16), nor between scores and years in the health care field (r = .06).